


Every Moment We Teeter

by NamelessDragon



Series: Until the Last Grave [1]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Actual (Temporary) Suicide, Again and Again, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, And then dies, Angst, Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Spoilers, Bisexual Brunnhilde | Valkyrie (Marvel), Bisexual Loki (Marvel), Dark, Dubious Consent, Dubious Fix-It, Eventual Temporary Female Loki (Marvel), Explicit Sexual Content, F/F, F/M, Hurt Loki (Marvel), Loki (Marvel) Lives, M/M, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Not Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Compliant, Panic Attacks, Rape, Sakaar (Marvel), Suicidal Thoughts, Temporary Character Death, Torture, angst with a shakily manageably traumatized ending?, but it won't have a completely downer end, repetitive character death, this is going to be a rough ride
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-14
Updated: 2018-11-10
Packaged: 2019-07-12 01:00:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 13
Words: 57,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15984221
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NamelessDragon/pseuds/NamelessDragon
Summary: A ship in flames around them. The stench of broken and burning electrical wiring. Thor beaten. The bright blue of the Tesseract's glow.A rush of memory, filling out his mind.He was dead.But he wasn't. Unless Helheim looked shockingly like Sakaar.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> First foray into this fandom. This fic is nearly complete and will post at least once a week, with twice a week updates (Thursdays and Saturdays) for the first few weeks. Unbeta'd.

Loki fell.

Air roared in his ears and his lungs spasmed as he strained for breath. His throat was swollen shut, his limbs unheeding to his commands. His momentum carried him into a mid-air spin in time to see the ground rushing up to meet him, the panic of helplessness whiting out his brain.

He landed with a crash in a sea of space debris. Blood filled his mouth from where he'd bitten through his tongue. He could not feel his arms or legs, could not move, could not _speak._ Could barely breathe. The scents of death, rot, and rusted metal filled what air he managed to inhale.

Eventually, voices reached his ears, carried over a mound of trash to his right. He reached for his magic, set on making himself disappear before he was found in such a helpless state. It was as unresponsive as the rest of him. 

In a full panic, he wheezed air in through his damaged throat until spots danced before his eyes, distorting the image of the hooded and masked creatures that surrounded him. 

"Are you fighter or food?"

_Neither,_ he wanted to scream, as his thoughts swirled in a raging tornado of terror and confusion. He knew this place. He'd been here before. The sky was lined with breaks in the atmosphere, roaring bright circles of openness between the clouds.

At his lack of reaction, the creatures began a cautious approach. He could only watch through eyes brimmed with tears of frustration as they grew close. One jabbed him in the side with a spear, hard enough to pierce his flesh and send blood pooling on the ground. Loki ground his teeth as his body was jarred, but the pain never registered. That fact frightened him most of all.

"Broken from the fall," one of them said. "Food."

"No!" Loki rasped. It hadn't been the fall that had done this to him. What had happened? 

They ignored his pathetic shout and began to drag him by his ankles through the rubble. His head flopped and slammed into the various trash items he was pulled over, his hair catching on edges and tearing out when he was mercilessly yanked every time he became ensnared. That, he felt.

He reached for his magic again, strained until his head spun. Nothing. He slammed his eyes shut and attempted to scream through a wrecked, swollen throat.

_Thor, where is Thor? Why am I here?_

Thor had...Thor had...

A ship in flames around them. The stench of broken and burning electrical wiring. Thor beaten. The bright blue of the Tesseract's glow. A gauntleted hand around Loki's neck, tight and implacable. The crush and snap of bone.

A rush of memory, filling out his mind. 

He was dead.

But he wasn't. Unless Helheim looked shockingly like Sakaar.

He was taken onto some sort of hovercraft and then dragged into a dilapidated building on the outskirts of the trash heap. The creatures lifted him and set him on a slab stained dark with what he assumed was the blood of several species. A hulking humanoid creature with two sets of arms, a thick fleshy face, and an apron similarly decorated with stains approached him with what looked like a large cleaver. 

_No!_

Again he tried to speak, but his voice remained unintelligible and the swelling in his throat only grew to further suffocating levels the more he strained.

Loki's mind raced as the creatures circled. This wasn't what had happened when he had landed on Sakaar the first time. He'd successfully hidden himself upon landing and had done reconnaissance on the planet, on its leader. 

Ebony Maw had been in proximity before Thanos had taken hold of him. Could this be a crafted illusion?

He discarded the thought. This illusion was much too elaborate to be one of Maw's tricks. And beyond the terror, there was a distinct lack of Maw's usual psychological and emotional manipulation.

Which meant Loki was about to die. Again. Though this time, he was to be hacked up and consumed.

When they started to cut away his clothing, Loki again began to scream, this time managing more volume through sheer desperation. Blood flooded his throat. One of the creatures made a sound of annoyance and slammed the hilt of his weapon down with a crack against Loki's skull. The world went black.

\-----------

Loki fell.

Down, down, through the sky once more.

The ground was still unforgiving, and he had sense now to feel the impact in its entirety, feel the way the air left his lungs and his spine seemed to shoot pain through every inch of his nerves. His limbs shook as he stared up into the portal through which he'd fallen, as he struggled to breathe.

This time, his mind was a bit clearer. 

Once he was able, he sat up and shook the hair from his face, panting through his teeth as he attempted to process what had happened. The odor of the trash heap was even worse now that he could breathe properly, the stench so thick it was like a solid thing settling into the back of his throat.

When the voices came, Loki's mind wailed at him to run, to hide. At the same time, a surge of anger rose so quickly it nearly choked him. Instead of following his first instinct to make himself scarce, he moved to his feet, stretched out the aches in his limbs, and waited. 

The first of the creatures appeared over the hill and paused cautiously at the sight of him on his feet. It was the same group that had taken him to the slaughterhouse.

"Are you fighter or food?"

Loki bared his teeth and summoned his knives, then slid from an illusion of himself and moved swiftly behind the creatures. The first two he stabbed simultaneously through the neck, then dodged and flitted between the others, gouging at them when given the chance, knives savagely tearing through flesh. His heart pounded in equal parts rage and fear as the memory of being paralyzed and set on the stone slab to carve like a goat brimmed heavy in his mind.

Soon they were all dead, the smell of fresh blood mixing with rot. He panted in the aftermath, his rage unquenched even though this current danger had passed. 

A slow clap echoed behind him. He turned with a start and immediately masked himself with a double for an illusion just as the Valkyrie, or Scrapper 142, stepped over the hill. Her hair was a frizzed mess where it was bound into a braid and her sluggish, uneven movements suggested a dip in sobriety.

He knew better than to underestimate her, even when she was drunk. 

"Well," she said. "You certainly killed them."

She didn't remember him. She couldn't, if time had truly reset itself again. If she caught him, he would be taken to the Grandmaster in chains, a position he very much wanted to avoid. 

He left his double to distract her as he began to race across the trash heaps.

A wide arc of blasts fired in a half circle in the direction of his escape route. He had to throw himself to the side and roll to escape the exploding debris. He came to a stop down on one knee on the ground as the dust settled around him. The heat from her ship's fire added an immediate additional layer of disgusting complexity to the scent of surrounding trash. He turned his head and glared as Valkyrie looked back smugly, her gauntlet-covered hands in sync with her scrap vessel, and aimed directly at his crouched form.

"Slippery little shit, aren't you?"

He vanished his knives and moved to his feet, raising his hands in peaceable surrender. She followed his movements but thankfully did not fire. 

"You're from Asgard," he said, keeping his voice calm and approachable.

She raised her eyebrows, unimpressed at his knowledge. "And so are you."

"You were a Valkyrie of Odin," he continued.

She adjusted her aim easily as he took a step forward again. He froze and kept a careful eye on her ship's guns, sincerely hoping to avoid another death.

He inhaled deeply to steady his nerves. "Hela killed your lover and you fled. Now here upon this planet you remain, the last of your kind. Doing your best to drink yourself to an early death."

Her amused look immediately faded and her eyes narrowed. "Who the hell are you?"

"A friend," he said. He cautiously lowered his hands. "In a few weeks time, a man will fall from the sky. Thor, son of Odin. He..." Loki twisted his lips, unable to believe what he was about to say. "He will help you find your purpose again."

Valkyrie frowned. Then she raised her hand and fired an obedience disc at his neck. 

The shock sent him to the ground.

"Odin and his son can go fuck themselves," she said.

_It was worth a try,_ Loki thought, as he jerked helplessly on the ground.

As he regained feeling in his limbs, the vision of her dragging him by his ankle sent his thoughts spiraling unpleasantly back to the butchers who had caught him before. He tried to defend himself, but the second he even considered summoning a knife she casually dropped his ankle and set his nerves alight with the obedience disc once more.

He panted in the aftermath, desperation beginning to flood his mind. "You can't take me to the Grandmaster."

She raised her eyebrows as if she was surprised at his audacity. "Can. Will. A girl's gotta drink. Thought you knew all about that?"

She shocked him again and then threw him haphazardly into a glass cage beneath her ship. He was only able to move again once it was well on its way towards the tower in the center of the city.

Loki pushed himself up onto his hands and stared with dread at the sculptures of the Grandmaster's Champions set into the front of his tower. The framework for the Hulk's had just been started.

"I have information I can trade," he tried. "I know who will prevail in tonight's matches."

She intentionally veered her ship sharply, causing Loki to slam into the side of the compartment with a grunt. "Not interested," she said.

Anger coursed through him, but he forced his voice to remain calm. "I have the codes to every security system the Grandmaster uses. Including those for his alcohol stores."

Another lurch, and he was slammed into the opposite side. 

"And you think I don't?" she asked.

Loki exhaled heavily, then turned to view their approach with trepidation. He wasn't ready to go back that city. The phantom sensations of too many hands on his body edged in. "I'm not lying," he said, eyes moving back to where she piloted the ship. "You cannot take me to him."

This time the disc felled him again in answer. She wouldn't even look at him as she spoke. "Word of advice? Bringing up my horrible past in an effort to manipulate me was exactly the wrong move. Now do me a favor and shut up."

_Bringing up your horrible past worked last time,_ Loki thought, clenching his jaw. Of course, she had just beaten the sense out of him and taken him to Thor in chains. And it would be weeks before Thor arrived on Sakaar, if things were going to move at the same pace as the original timeline.

Loki tried not to think too hard on it. He felt dizzy, and there was a lasting tremor in his hands he tried to tell himself was just from the after effects of the disc. He kept silent for the rest of the journey and tried to regather his wits, to breathe through the stuffy heat of the compartment where he was trapped.

When they landed, she shocked him into unconsciousness. He woke surrounded by guards in the Grandmaster's acquisition viewing chambers, shackled to a chair and gagged with a belt.

\-----------

"Contender," Valkyrie said, and relayed a holographic recording of his dispatch of the raiding creatures. The Grandmaster stared with an awed and pleased expression, while Topaz sent not at all subtle glares at Valkyrie behind his back.

Loki watched from his chair, seething and chewing at the hard leather pressed between his teeth. It tasted of dirt and sweat. At least the interior of the Grandmaster's tower had a filtration system in place to weed out the smell of the trash heaps that lined the city.

He would not panic, he told himself as his chest heaved. The Grandmaster would not know him in this timeline as much as Valkyrie did not. His betrayal, the revolution, all of that had been erased. The Grandmaster would only see him as another slave to be used, not as a criminal to be executed. And if he was alive, he would have a chance of escape.

And when he was free, he was going to enjoy making Valkyrie relive the memories of her fall as repayment of his imprisonment. 

_No,_ he thought a moment later. That wasn't right. She would help him, if she could. He just had to find the right words. 

But perhaps it was better to wait until he felt a bit less like those right words would be best accompanied with a knife stab to her person. 

The Grandmaster moved closer to examine him. "You've gagged him."

Valkyrie shrugged. "He was chatty. Tried to tell me about some Asgardian prince that would fall from the sky in a few weeks."

"Did he?" The Grandmaster's eyes moved over Loki in a calculated fashion. 

Loki felt a chill, and his heart began to pound harder the longer he was regarded. He clenched his hands, and hated the part of himself that grew warm at the interested appraisal.

The Grandmaster must have been pleased with what he found. He gave a satisfied smile and waved a hand at his attendant. "Topaz, pay her. Whatever she wants. No arguments."

The Grandmaster's eyes were glued to Loki's face like a hawk, so he was only vaguely aware of Valkyrie's eyes on him as she left. She was a minor concern compared to the old and powerful and mad being to which she had sold him.

The Grandmaster rose from his chair and circled behind Loki, humming in approval, his fingers drifting over a tense shoulder. He'd imbibed recently, the scent of spices and alcohol wafting from his robes. Loki kept his body steady and his eyes directed forward. He ignored the fact that he was being watched by Topaz and her guards. When he felt a hand touch the side of his face, he suppressed his flinch and purposefully leaned into the touch.

The Grandmaster paused in surprise, then chuckled and carded his fingers softly through the hair on top of Loki's head. "You're an affectionate one."

Loki felt his ears burn even as he hummed a sound of agreement.

Eventually, hands moved to loosen the straps bound behind his head. "Here, let me just - oohh, that's a nasty red print, that was in really tight. You, uh, must have really made Scrapper 142 angry."

Loki worked his jaw, tasting blood at the edges of his mouth, and went over in his mind with a roiling gut the methods he had employed before to end up in the Grandmaster's good graces.

He let a smile slide onto his face, kept his expression open and amiable. "Surely there's an arrangement we can come to."

The Grandmaster put a hand back in Loki's hair, and the other reached down to caress Loki's chest. "An arrangement? Honey, sweetie, my apparent little soothsayer, I haven't even told you what I want yet. I uh, I don't even know your name."

Loki gulped and tried to ignore the touch as it dipped even lower, over his abdomen and between his legs. "A-Apologies. My name is Loki."

The Grandmaster abruptly stepped back and clapped his hands together. Loki hated himself for how bereft he felt at the loss. "Well, Loki, if you make me happy with Plan A, I'll go ahead and maybe consider a Plan B. I won't even make you room with the other fighters. I'm getting the sense that you prefer to be a bit more of a renegade, a bit more of a, a, a, - a lone wolf. Hey, great name that, for a fighter's title. Lone Wolf. What do you think, sound good?"

That was a _terrible_ name. "I -"

"Of course it's good!" He tapped Loki on the nose with his finger. "You seem to uh, have a real sense of what I want. This is exciting. Maybe when it's time to send out my Champion again, I'll even give you a crack at it."

_Damn._

\-----------

Loki was led to his own cell. He stood quietly as the guards filtered out and the barrier was raised. It was difficult to resist the urge to touch the obedience disc where it bit into his flesh, ready to activate if he tried to leave the perimeter of his quarters. He slowly walked his prison, taking in the bed and the bathing room, small but luxurious compared to the lodging he would have been forced to endure when roomed with the fighters meant for fodder.

The Grandmaster had been so easily charmed by Loki upon their meeting in the original timeline, it made his head spin a bit at the fact that this time he'd been so wrong footed, when he thought he had a sense of the rules. And it stung, though Loki hated himself for it, that he was not to be treated with the same amount of reverence as his first time in the Grandmaster's care.

Even if he could have, in all honesty, done with a bit less of the Grandmaster's particular form of reverence upon their first meeting.

_Liar,_ his mind supplied. He shuddered, and tried to take his mind off the unfulfilled edge of arousal caused by the Grandmaster's hands.

So, he was going to the fighting pits. Perhaps the Grandmaster would start him off small, with weaker foes. He hadn't blustered about his capabilities in the same way Thor had, but then again, neither had the Grandmaster been given recorded evidence of Thor's capability for slaughter. The Hulk the Grandmaster kept in reserve, at least, not wanting to dull the excitement of his appearances by making them too frequent. If he wanted Loki to face the beast, it would not be for a few weeks.

He finally gave in and ran his fingers over the obedience disc clenched into the skin of his neck. It gave a gentle buzz in warning and he felt the metal claws dig in tighter. He lowered his hand with a displeased sigh. He stubbornly avoided thinking too hard on the memories of his recent deaths. Whether they had really happened or were just strange visions of the future, he was here now. 

He only needed to ensure he survived until Thor arrived. Then they could plan their escape.

First, he needed to wash the scent of trash from his clothes and person.

\-----------

Loki did not fight the guards when they summoned him for the pre-fight preparations. There was no point, and he had no desire to end up manacled back into a chair.

He was taken not to the usual fighter stylist but to several of the Grandmaster's personal attendants and sat in a cushioned chair. His hair was combed and adorned with jeweled beads and braids. He breathed evenly through the treatment and said nothing, happy that his hair would not be receiving the same shave that Thor's had. 

It gave him hope that perhaps the fighting pits were not the planned end game for him. After all, he knew from previous experience that the Grandmaster found his current look very attractive, had in another life offered again and again in a wheedling fashion for Loki to be dressed and styled to his liking. Loki had managed, for the most part, to appease him with a slight wardrobe change.

An attendant dressed in gold stepped forward with a small bowl in her hands. Loki narrowed his eyes at her approach, remembering the Grandmaster's affinity for drugs. She faltered at his gaze, uncertain. 

Not one who usually tended to unbound and belligerent fighters, then. The guards had shifted to attention around Loki, their hands on the shock controllers. The other attendants had paused nervously with their own tasks.

The woman before him showed him the contents of the bowl. It was filled with blue paint. "The Grandmaster said it would please him if you were to be decorated in his colors. It would make you more worthy of his attentions."

Loki swallowed. Well, that answered the question of whether or not the Grandmaster remained interested in him. Though the wording left something to be desired.

He viciously resented the thought that he would have a need to make himself worthy of anything.

But it wasn't as if he had much choice.

He forced his features to soften and tilted his head back. "By all means."

She hesitated. "You...you will need to remove your garments."

Of course he would.

Loki stood with a heavy sigh, disrobed - manually, in case the guards took offense to him using magic - and stood docile while the other attendants moved forward and scrubbed his flesh with moist foam pads. He was dried with towels and then the attendant with the paint went to work with a set of brushes she kept on a pouch at her waist. He tightened his lips as their soft ends caressed large portions of his torso, tickling his skin.

When she was finished, a setting spray was used from the neck down, and then a large set of mirrors was placed around him, so he could see what she had done. Lines curved and twisted about his torso and down his biceps, and he rolled his eyes as he noted that the grouping of lines close to his left shoulder formed the ravening head of a wolf.

The mirrors were removed, and when he turned to address her she and the other attendants were already gone, having taken his clothes with her. He looked to the guards with a raised eyebrow, refusing to appear ashamed of his nudity even if he wanted nothing more than to conjure some armor.

"Some protection wouldn't go amiss," he said.

They didn't respond. Loki clenched his jaw and breathed in heavily through his nose, but did not prod. He did not need to be weakened by a round of punishment from the disc before being thrown into the arena.

Eventually, the door to the room opened and three new women of varying species filed in, each holding a bundle of cloth. They placed them on a table that sat against the wall and filed out without a word.

"Your weapons and attire," one of the guards said.

Loki took that as permission and moved to the items against the wall. He found a note pinned to the first bundle.

_Presents for my little wolf._

Oh, how the possessive note and pet name grated on Loki's nerves. Especially since the first time they'd met, it had been the Grandmaster that had to draw Loki in, flirting and softly coaxing Loki into his web. Now he knew he'd already had Loki ensnared upon their very first meeting.

Well, he would play the game.

The first bundle he unwrapped to reveal a set of blue-hilted daggers. He examined them and found them a good weight, probably made with one of the better metals that had fallen to Sakaar over the years. 

The armor similarly was silver and blue and fitted to his exact measurements. It also left a distressing amount of flesh unguarded. His left shoulder was completely bare, keeping the painted wolf on display.

He was going to die because of the Grandmaster's vanity.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dubious consent of varying forms in this chapter, but Loki still has it pretty easy compared to what's to come. Next chapter will be posted Thursday.

The arena smelled of death. And beyond that, it felt like death. A place where millions had met their violent ends over years and years. Loki had felt this same energy before, in the dark places of Asgard, and the open snow fields of Jotunheim. He’d felt it in the cells of Sanctuary. It had dripped from Thanos and his Children like tar. It had coated Loki himself, after they had shaped him.

The air vibrated with the cries of thousands, with anticipatory stomps and claps. Loki was used to large crowds screaming in excitement, the deafening roar of cheers - usually for Thor. Even if he had never been exactly on this end of it in this particular way, that part, at least, he had experience in tuning out.

"And now, please welcome The Lone Wolf!"

The Grandmaster's hologram gleefully announced his arrival as he stepped through the doorway into the arena, his hands on his knives, every inch of him aware of the purpose of this place. He scanned the edges of the arena, where the invisible fence was located that would set off his obedience disc if he attempted to scale the wall. The Grandmaster's hologram stared down at Loki as if he could see him through the projection. Perhaps he could - Loki had never been allowed to join him while he made his pre-fight announcements.

"And his opponents, the Chitauri Brothers."

Loki's confusion gave way to an instinctive repulsion the instant he saw the hissing creatures venture through the door. He remembered these Chitauri from his first time on Sakaar. When he'd asked how the Grandmaster had acquired them, having thought all Chitauri had perished, he'd been waved off with words about how hive mind species were very simple to reanimate.

The Chitauri were clearly perturbed, keeping close together, adrift without their hundreds of companions. Even if they'd been connected, the thousands of them sent against the Avengers in New York may as well have been cannon fodder.

It was to be an easy first go. Loki felt both relieved and completely insulted. These Chitauri "brothers" - obvious victims of the Grandmaster's naming style - had in fact been summarily dispatched early on in his first visit to Sakaar, during one of his very first viewings of the fights. It would be no different this time around.

He would not defeat them too quickly, though. The Grandmaster enjoyed a spectacle, would become more ingratiated to Loki the more entertaining he became. He would perform.

He twirled his daggers and bared his teeth.

The Chitauri looked confused at the sight of him, but not for long. Their screeching filled his ears as they fired their weapons, as Loki quickly dodged, unwilling to test just how resilient his custom-made armor would be against their laser blasts. He summoned one of his own throwing knives and launched it across the arena, purposefully aiming for an arm.

The Chitauri's answering shriek and bending double let him know he had met his mark. Now only needing to dodge one ranged attack, he was able to sprint towards his attackers, intent on ignoring his preferred tactics and instead simulate a hunting wolf in hopes it pleased the Grandmaster.

For there was a further advantage he had that he had not even yet considered. Having already lived through the viewing of several fights and having spent hours listening to the Grandmaster go over his favorite fighters as they clashed, he had retained a large amount of information on each of the Grandmaster's arena contestants. Mostly because a great number of them belonged to species he had never seen before, and the scholar side of him had watched the fights with interest in their biological abilities and tactics.

Later, he had done it with an added sense of self preservation and dread of the more vicious creatures, hoping that the Grandmaster would not get it into his head to invite any of them to his leisure vessel at the same time as Loki.

He would cheat these games, just as he had somehow again cheated death.

Frantic gunfire missed as he swerved on pumping legs, and when he reached the Chitauri he folded so that he would slide on the dirt between them, ignoring the armor as it dug sharply into his shins from the pressure. At the same time, he lashed out with his daggers, cutting into the flesh of their legs and maiming them both. They collapsed as he came to a stop, turned, and leapt upon them with his blades aimed at their throats.

Their bodies struggled, then stilled. 

The crowd cheered.

Face and hands flecked with blood, and nose full of the scent of fresh death, Loki gazed up at the Grandmaster's viewing box. He thought he could see a smile.

\-----------

Many of the fighters in the arena were about as gullible as Thor in his younger days when it came to Loki's illusions. They were also all prone to death by multiple dagger stab wounds, though some took more effort than others. He continued to present himself as wolf-like as possible, to show how willing he was to go along with the Grandmaster's terrible idea. He even expended excess energy to shapeshift into a wolf to messily finish off an opponent once, to the riotous cheers of the crowd. He'd hated it, the proximity, the blood that poured positively everywhere and coated his tongue long after he changed back - and swore to himself it was something he would do only very rarely from now on. Which was just as well - he knew that a few opponents in his future would have toxic flesh and blood.

Loki survived his first night in the arena. And the second. And the third. The opponents grew more difficult, his wounds a bit more numerous each night, but each time he prevailed.

Then came the fight with the Kree. 

He’d grown in favor among the crowd. They did not chant his title yet, but their cries of excitement were growing louder with each victory. The Grandmaster’s hologram had to wave to quiet them as he began his announcement for Loki’s opponents.

Two Kree entered opposite, tall even for their ilk, well-muscled and each carrying a large hammer. With a pang, Loki thought of Thor. He was growing impatient for his brother’s arrival, longingly anticipating the day that they would leave the Grandmaster’s kingdom in shambles.

The Kree knew enough of Loki’s tactics in previous fights to spread themselves out and keep themselves on the defense. They also had the presence of mind to be nervous as they carefully crossed the arena towards him. Strength would be their primary weapon, and Loki would have to rely more cautiously on speed and weak points and less on theatrics.

That did not mean he had to dispense with theatrics entirely. He smirked and shapeshifted into a silver wolf, then created a dozen identical snarling clones to surround him. The Kree paused as the wolves began to approach, weaving through each other, with Loki hidden at their center. When they began to run forward as a pack, the crowd cheered.

Loki carefully searched for his opening as he and the illusions sprinted through, the first couple bursting from existence as the Kree brought down their hammers. He circled behind and leapt to tear through an artery in the biggest one’s neck, using his momentum to aid his teeth as they tore through flesh. The Kree cried out and dropped his hammer, his hand shooting out to grab Loki’s hind leg. Loki snarled and turned his head to snap at the hand that held him, his satisfaction at the Kree’s scream from the bite cut short as it brought its other hand down and something metal clamped around his neck.

Nausea lurched up Loki’s stomach as he released the Kree and crashed into the ground. The world jarred out of wolf senses as he was forced back to Asgardian form, trembling in shock against the arena floor. An overwhelming pressure vibrated through his throat and ruthlessly crushed his magic. The Kree that had held him collapsed from blood loss at his side as Loki raised a shaking hand to the collar that bound him.

_“The Tesseract, or your brother’s head.”_

_No._

The hammer that slammed into his side sent him flying across the arena and into the wall, rubble exploding outwards. His hands raised to his neck as soon as he regained his senses, searching for the lock. But the metal was seamless, built to his measurements, and tailored specifically to his magic. He turned wide eyes on the Grandmaster’s viewing box, could see the man hunch eagerly as he watched.

Loki ground his teeth in terror, his mind circling on only one thought - _get it off._

The remaining Kree was running at him. He desperately dodged the first attack but was slowed enough by the distracting constriction at his throat that the second one caught his side and sent him to the ground. The cheers of the crowd had died down and boos began to filter in. Loki tried to drag himself away but he was kicked onto his back, a boot coming down onto his neck to hold him still as his opponent began to send vicious hammer blows into his torso.

Something cracked. Loki arched with a strained gasp. The pain helped clarify his mind, to draw his mind from the memory of Thanos’s unyielding grip. He screamed and gripped the ankle of the foot that had him pinned, pushing with his full strength to send the Kree warrior off balance.

He rolled away and climbed unsteadily to his feet, gasping as sharp pain at his ribs limited his movement. He forced himself to ignore the collar, to accept its presence. He had allowed his fear to make him sloppy. He did not need another death to mar his memories, not when he had worked so hard to get this far. 

He swallowed, and noted the increased confidence in the Kree. He let pain and fear show on his face more fully. Let them underestimate him. It did not matter if the emotions were true.

He dodged the first hammer blow and then brought up the sharp-edged piece of rubble he had palmed and quickly lashed at the soft vitreous of the attacking Kree’s eyes. The Kree stumbled back with a cry, dropping the hammer and clamping hands over his bleeding face. Feeling the pain of his own injuries increase by the moment, Loki used the fallen hammer against the Kree’s mutilated face, sending him swiftly into unconsciousness.

Loki swallowed his nausea and fought the urge to drop to his knees, shutting his eyes as the Grandmaster announced his victory. The door to his side of the arena opened. Loki panted as he stared at the welcoming gaping darkness. His pulse was loud in his ears, each beat reminding him of the tightness at his neck.

He stumbled forward, barely making it over the threshold before he crashed down. Guards moved forward and quickly unlatched the collar from his neck.

Loki’s magic sprang free and immediately worked to help heal his deeper injuries. He wavered on his knees, and then grit his teeth as the guards helped him up to return him to his room.

\-----------

By the time the first week of fighting had come to an end, his summons for the usual cosmetic adjustments ended with the paint being applied. He stood for an interminably long time in the room, awaiting his armor and weapons, before he looked towards the guards.

"Am I to fight naked?" He kept an edge of joking to his voice, but there was a coil of cold dread settling in his gut that this would be exactly the case. Maybe the Grandmaster had grown bored of him and finally decided to give his opponents another extra handicap on top of the magic-suppressing collar. He was still incapable of moving completely normally, his chest and belly a mass of bruises.

The door behind him opened and he turned expectantly. But instead of the usual three women, the Grandmaster himself swanned in. His golden robe flared about his legs as he moved.

The Grandmaster grinned as if Loki was a pleasant surprise and not exactly where the Grandmaster had ordered him to be held. "Loki! Good to see you, cutie pie. And great fight last night, by the way. Let me take a look at you - yikes! That looks like it smarts. I uh, I have some cream for that, come on - let's take a walk."

There was a hand over his shoulders, and the Grandmaster began to pull him towards the door, but Loki planted his feet. His side gave a twinge in protest.

The Grandmaster frowned and swung around so they were face to face. "Hey, hey, what's the problem?"

Loki kept his voice low and friendly, his lips curved into a smile. "Apologies, Grandmaster, but - some clothes wouldn't go amiss."

The Grandmaster gave him a once over with a frown. "What, what are you talking about? You look great! Plus, those injuries look pretty widespread. Very, ah, very _pointless_ to waste time covering up when you're just going to need to take it off again."

Loki's face burned. "My magic," he said, "if I can just-"

The Grandmaster's expression changed, ever so slightly. "You know, I'm sure hearing an awful lot of arguing for someone who was so intent on my attention a week ago."

_Fuck._ He heard the unspoken warning loud and clear. His heart in his throat, Loki dropped his eyes to the ground and nodded. "Of course."

The Grandmaster slid his arm back over Loki's shoulder and pulled him in close. "See? Easier when we do things my way. Come on, let me show you around a bit."

Loki's steps dragged from more than pained stiffness as he was taken out into the glaring lights of the very public halls. The Grandmaster went on chatting idly about his impressions of the fights of the previous night, but Loki didn't register it over his extreme awareness of the eyes that openly ogled his body as he was paraded through the tower like a trophy.

That was what he was, after all.

At least most of the creatures had a measure of wariness about them. He chose to believe it was because they had seen him fight and not because it was clear he was to be the Grandmaster's latest personal sexual conquest.

They stepped by a room from which came the raucous laughter of several very inebriated species. Loki was very careful not to look inside to see if it was him they laughed at, which was why his eyes fell immediately on Valkyrie as she rounded the corner ahead of them.

She locked eyes with Loki, hesitated, then trailed her gaze down and locked her eyes lower.

Loki held his breath at her open and not entirely unappreciative scrutiny, and then his muscles began to progressively tighten in horror as he felt something deep within him begin to react.

The Grandmaster pulled him to a stop.

Oh, _Norns,_ if he could just die now.

The Grandmaster gave a wide smile. "Scrapper 142, little early in the day to be drinking, isn't it?"

Her eyes finally tore away from Loki's cock and she gave the Grandmaster a cheeky smile. "It's never too early," she said.

A delighted laugh sounded in Loki's ear, the Grandmaster pulling him in tighter in his merriment. "There's my girl. Stop by my ship tonight, the gold one. A new type of alcohol fell through the wormhole in sector 8. Big, gigantic crate, must be hundreds of bottles of the stuff. All intact, can you believe it? Gives you a tingling sensation in the ears that's - it's really quite pleasant, actually. Haven't tested out the side effects on some of the weaker species yet, but I'm fairly sure you'll be fine."

"Sounds wonderful." Her smile faded a bit, her eyes going back to Loki, and now there was something in them that was slightly wary. He raised his chin to offer her a self-assured smirk, pretending with everything he had that he was at ease and happy to have her open scrutiny. She kept her gaze on him as she finally moved on.

The Grandmaster beamed. "I love her. Really, really great gal."

Loki's sense of anxiety did not lower when he finally entered the Grandmaster's chambers, rather it just shifted in form. He hated this version of the timeline. At least he'd had some sense of agency when in the Grandmaster's good graces before. Now he burned at the thought that he would be treated as a slave just as much here, in the bedroom, as he had in the arena.

The Grandmaster was mixing a drink in a bar at the far wall. He dabbed some sort of clear gel on his own lips and then took a long swallow from his glass, shutting his eyes in pleasure before he turned back to Loki.

"On the bed," he said, gesturing with his drink towards the grandiose piece of furniture with its blue blankets and golden posts and sheer, glittering curtains. "Go ahead, darling. Make yourself comfortable."

Loki carefully climbed into the center of the generously sized bed and stretched out onto his back, his muscles reveling in the softness. He stared at the mirror set in the canopy and ignored the pang in his gut as he used it to present himself more artfully, adjusting his braided hair and bringing up one leg. The scent of familiar spices that followed the Grandmaster was much more intense in this bedroom. Memories crowded back into his mind, and he shut his eyes with a frown as he tried to push them away, tried not to anticipate. His arousal simmered low in his belly all the same.

He felt the bed dip and opened his eyes to find the Grandmaster taking him in fully with a happy sigh. There was a jar in his hand, the inside filled with a substance that was cream yellow with a swirl of purple. It smelled so sweet that Loki wondered if it was the cream the Grandmaster had mentioned or some sort of dessert. There were enough drugs in the food on Sakaar that it could have even been both.

The Grandmaster put his hand on Loki's raised knee with easy familiarity. "I can't tell you how often I imagined you in here this last week."

Loki smiled, the expression almost entirely natural as relief flooded him at the Grandmaster's admission. "Oh?"

The Grandmaster turned his eyes down Loki's torso as he began to move his hand from Loki's knee to thigh. "I had this feeling you would be magnificent. Not the best, mind you, but certainly - certainly up there." He dipped his fingers into the jar and then moved them towards Loki's ribs.

Loki could not help the tension and resulting grimace as the Grandmaster made contact, expecting pressure and pain. Except that the Grandmaster's touch was light, and the cream he soon trailed across Loki's torso was warm. He felt it tingle and then sink into his bones.

Loki couldn't help his moan as the Grandmaster continued his ministrations, healing the hurts the arena had caused. 

"You've got a great mind on you," the Grandmaster went on, “it uh, it adapts to a variety of situations. Must have been some upbringing, to make a creature like you. Some hardships."

"Many," Loki breathed, soaking in the praise, arching against the Grandmaster's hands and refusing to feel ashamed at his rapidly hardening cock.

"And you overcame them all, didn't you."

_A gauntleted hand around his neck._

The memory came so fast and bright that Loki shuddered with a gasp, his lungs suddenly not able to draw in enough air. He rushed his hand to the front of his throat for a tactile reassurance of his current existence and just as soon pulled violently away as his heart seized again at the touch. 

The Grandmaster was staring at him intently, a small furrow between his brows. He hadn't paused in his application of the cream. "You all right there, Lo-honey? Breathing a bit rough."

"Yes," Loki said, his insides twisting, trying to keep his attention on the massaging motions being administered to keep his mind from sliding back into the memory. "Just...enjoying your touch."

The Grandmaster's eyes lit up, his lips stretching into a pleased smile. "I do try." He sat up to put the cream aside, and Loki clenched his hands into fists and choked back a protest at the loss of the hands on his skin. 

But the Grandmaster was quick to venture back over. "So, what do you say to some warm up before the party tonight?"

Finally, Loki thought. He reached up and grasped at the Grandmaster's robes, a bit desperately. He pulled him in close, happy that his ribs no longer screamed with the movement. He was rewarded with a pleased laugh. "Getting handsy, little wolf." When Loki hesitated, he went on, "No, no, no, I like it. Tonight, hmmm, tonight I might want you a bit more, hmm, - tied down - but right now, with just you and me, I think I'm in the mood for a bit more - physical participation. What do you say?"

Eager for anything to get his mind off the horrors that lurked in his memories, Loki nodded. "I aim to please, Grandmaster."

"Oh! Almost forgot." The Grandmaster slid from the bed and returned carrying a bundle of leather straps attached to some sort of shaped device. When it was turned to be displayed to Loki fully, he recognized it as a wolf mask, sleek and silver. "Lift up your head for me, would you?"

\-----------

There was irony in the fact that the Grandmaster allowed him to take more initiative in their sexual activities, to perform more aggressively, than he had during the time he'd allowed Loki to retain more of a semblance of freedom in his graces. With the obedience disc firmly embedded in the flesh of his neck, however, there was never any doubt as to where he stood. He tore skin with nails and teeth as he was fucked and imagined he could harm the Grandmaster beyond what he allowed. The delighted laughter that followed his attempts at damage only increased his frustration, and then that faded as lust overtook everything and he howled like the wolf the Grandmaster had named him.

But he was beginning to hope, now that the Grandmaster was going to allow him to filter among the partygoers. He only needed to send a single controller to a pocket dimension, and then he would be able to remove the disc and escape at his leisure. If he waited long enough for Thor's arrival, he would even be able to free them both in one fell swoop.

Loki was allowed to wash again before the party, though he knew from previous experience on the Grandmaster's leisure vessels it would be unlikely he would stay clean for long. The Grandmaster was gone when Loki re-entered the room, and his personal bodyguard, Topaz, stood near the door. Her eyes were bored and annoyed, and a wooden box was between her hands. Her annoyed gaze increased in intensity when she set eyes on Loki.

She gestured with the box. "The Grandmaster had other duties to attend to. You're to put these on and follow me."

Loki had never seen Topaz be more than a sounding board for the Grandmaster and leader of the guards. The fact that she was also being used as a personal assistant - and furious about it - soothed some of Loki's shame about being seen so soon after he'd obviously whored himself to her boss for a better standing.

Loki pasted on a brilliant smile and moved forward to accept the box. "Thank you."

She grunted and rolled her eyes. "No lip. Hurry up."

Loki placed the box on the bed and opened it to examine the contents. He was glad he was turned away, so Topaz would not see his face fall.

There were no clothes in the box. Instead, a great majority of the space inside was filled with a plush cushion. On top of the cushion rested two silver cuffs. Hesitantly, he reached out to touch one and then immediately felt an overpowering sensation of pressure in his fingers. They were magic-suppressing cuffs, clearly made from the same material as the collar given to the Kree.

Loki let his eyes fall shut in frustration. 

_Damn him._

He forced his eyes open and exhaled deeply to steel himself, then he reached for the first cuff and ground his teeth as he placed it on one wrist. He felt the pressure increase as it sealed shut, his mind berating him for being complicit in increasing his own helplessness. His heart pounded at the familiar trapped feeling as he attached the second one to his opposite wrist before he could think too long on it or inspire Topaz to help.

There went the pocket dimension plan for tonight. It was a small mercy that the Grandmaster had chosen to adorn his wrists instead of his neck.

He turned to Topaz and summoned another smile, as if he didn't have the sensation of his magic being smothered overwhelming every other concern. "Ready to go."

His mind raced as she led him through the corridors. He still had about twelve days before Thor would crash land on this miserable heap of garbage. He had the Grandmaster's access codes compiled in his mind. And he knew, for the most part, the path things would follow when Thor arrived. He only needed to be patient and survive.

_You've thought that before,_ he reminded himself. _You know the game, you know plenty of the rules and the outcomes. Why haven't you managed to free yourself yet?_

He ruthlessly tried to squash the voice by thinking about how pleasant being again doted on by the Grandmaster would be, especially at first. He would take time to work Loki up to the more strenuous activities, and this time Loki was prepared. He would be able to wrap his mind around such games far in advance and know just how to suffer the pleasure and pain.

And tonight, he would relax and enjoy himself, perhaps have a few drinks. He hated not having his wits, of not being in control of his own mind, but he was also certain that if he was not offered something tonight to dull his senses he was going to scream.

He was led to one of the larger leisure vessels, the interior of which was already filled with partygoers and loud music. The Grandmaster was speaking with some of them, but instead of leading Loki to them Topaz put a rough hand on his shoulder to pull him to a stop. He resisted the look of outrage he very dearly wanted to send her way, his nerves strung tight with anger.

She shook her head. "Not to him. This way."

He was pulled to what looked like a large lounge chair, covered in gold fabric that matched the Grandmaster's robes, with gold chains set in the back of it.

"Ah," Loki said. "I don't suppose-"

Her hold on him tightened. "The Grandmaster said this is your spot for the night. Sit."

Loki kept his voice placating. "I will do so. I was actually rather hoping for a drink."

She lifted a shock controller from her belt. "Sit down and shut up."

Loki clamped his lips into a thin line and breathed out through flared nostrils. He slowly sat, eyes no longer hiding his rage.

Topaz reached for one of his wrists and brought it above his head. "Yeah, yeah. As if I've never received a death glare before."

When both of his hands were chained overhead, she reached under and pulled up another set of shackles, which she attached to his ankles, ensuring he would not be escaping from his reclined position until they were removed. Then she walked away without another word. 

Loki swallowed and tested his bonds, already knowing they would hold firm. The attempt at using magic that followed increased the feeling of pressure at his wrists and spread it outward until it seemed that a large weight was crushing his lungs more and more as he strained. 

He forced himself to release his magic and caught his breath. He looked expectantly towards the Grandmaster, who paused in his speaking long enough to notice the attention and send Loki a jolly wave before he resumed his conversation. He made no move to come over or even look at Loki again.

Loki jerked at his chains, then tilted his head back and slumped. Wonderful. He scanned the room, filled to the brim with opulent couches and chairs, and long windows exposing the sunset over the city. A few pairs of eyes locked on him appreciatively, but no one approached, which only further cemented the burn of humiliation Loki felt at being posed as a decoration. He began to have a suspicion that the Grandmaster had only healed his bruises so he would have an unmarked body to view.

He wondered if the Grandmaster was planning on whoring him out to any of the partygoers or if he would spend the night on display but unmolested. He was not sure which thought he disliked more. But again, there was no choice, and whichever way events turned, he would be ready.

He'd begun to obsessively worry at his hands in frustration when a straw appeared in his field of vision. He blinked in confusion, then turned his eyes down to see a wide rimmed glass. It was held by Valkyrie.

She raised her eyebrows at his look. "Said you wanted a drink, didn't you?"

Loki gave a cautious and confused nod, but gratefully sucked down the alcohol all the same. The sweetness of alien fruit coated his tongue. One of his preferred drinks on Sakaar, in fact, though in the past he would have taken his time with drinking it. The alcohol contained within was extremely strong, even by Asgardian standards. 

Valkyrie gave him a surprised and mildly impressed look as he swallowed it down. "Pegged you for liking the sweeter ones," she said as she pulled the empty glass away and tossed it haphazardly on the floor.

The alcohol was already warming his body and numbing the edges of his mind, so he didn't even comment on her poor manners. "Thank you," he breathed. The knot of near constant tension in his chest finally, _finally,_ began to fade into the background.

It immediately returned alongside a yelp of surprise as Valkyrie straddled him and grabbed his cock. "Easy," she said. "It's a leisure vessel. Take some leisure."

He darted a glance towards the Grandmaster, to see if he approved or not, but the man was still enjoying the company of other guests. That would mean approval. He hoped. It wasn't as if he was in much of a position to remove her if she meant to stay.

"What should I call you, by the way?" Valkyrie asked

"Loki," he answered, eyes still on the Grandmaster.

"Not 'The Lone Wolf?'" She went quiet at his lack of response, then suddenly began to move her hand up and down with firm pressure. 

That gained his attention. Loki's cock eagerly sprang up between her fingers and his hips rose. He grasped at the chains that bound him and watched her hand as he struggled to remember her question.

"The Grandmaster chose that," he managed to answer.

She smirked, smug at his reaction. "It's really a terrible name."

"I - ah! - I _know._ " 

Somewhere in his mind, alarm bells were signaling for him to tread carefully at disrespecting the Grandmaster at one of his own parties, where any of the guests within earshot could hear. Another side of him was grateful for even a somewhat kindred spirit after the long week alone between fights and loosened enough by the alcohol that he didn't care.

Another hard pull and he arched up against her hands, twisting his wrists in their bonds. "As if...as if Scrapper 142 is especially fitting a name for a heroic narrative."

Valkyrie stopped her ministrations and reached out for his hair, tugging his head back, baring his throat. Her face hovered over his, their eyes locked. Loki's hard cock pressed against her thigh, and he had the very strong urge to grind against her.

"Do you really think of yourself as a hero?" she asked.

_No, but Thor thinks I am. Or rather, he did. Now he just knows me for the murderer I am. Again._ "Depends on the day," Loki answered.

"You know," she said, "I would have just ignored you, but then I saw the way you looked at the Grandmaster's second."

Loki wet his lips with his tongue. "And?" He squirmed beneath her, trying for friction, but she forced him flat and still. 

She tilted her head, her hair brushing against his collarbone. "And you don't look at me the same way, even though I'm the reason you're in this position. I don't know. Wasn't even sure you liked women, the way you flirted with the Grandmaster. But I think maybe I'm just drunk enough not to tell you to go fuck yourself."

Hope sprang up that maybe he would finally have an ally to help him rise among this mess, but Loki hesitated. If he told her the truth of what was happening to him, she was going to think he was insane. He himself was even beginning to think the teamwork with Thor and the destruction of Asgard and everything that came after was some sort of cruel fever dream. 

Her free hand pressed against his throat, and he knew she could feel his pulse beat a frantic rhythm in response. "You said we were friends, but I've never seen you before in my life."

Loki laughed, but half of his mind was now back to the memories aboard the Statesman, of bodies littering the ground and the Black Order surrounding him.

_"Your savior is here!"_

"Technically, I didn't say we were friends," Loki corrected. "I said _I_ was a friend. You responded by shocking me senseless and selling me into slavery."

Her grip tightened over his trachea, anger lighting in her eyes. "Don't use that word, you idiot."

_Thor's desperate gaze. A gauntleted hand on his throat. Thanos's dispassionate expression as he squeezed._

"Loki? Loki!"

Loki gasped in a frantic breath, his wrists and ankles sore. Valkyrie still straddled him, but her hands were now on his shoulders, pinning him against the chair. He'd lost time.

He pulled at the chains that tethered him, needing access to his magic, needing the ability to move. The sensation of being smothered increased the more he tried to reach for his magic, tried to force it out from where it was being locked down from the cuffs. It was no use. He was trapped, trussed helpless and anyone in this room could easily put their hand around his throat and squeeze while he wouldn't have the leverage to even struggle. He would perish again, gaping like a fish and -

Soft lips on his. Loki flinched, and a spear of confusion and panic filled him at the sensation before his brain caught up to what he felt. Valkyrie was kissing him, her hand in his hair holding him steady, her other hand at his cheek. She delved her tongue against his lips, which were spread as he breathed in panicked gasps, and then nipped at his lip, hard. His cock, which had flagged in his fear, suddenly grew greatly interested.

She finally withdrew, and her eyes carefully gazed into his.

He panted for breath, the pounding of his heart painful in his chest. 

Valkyrie examined him with a frown for another few seconds, before she moved to her feet, ignoring the fluids that stained her clothes. "I think we both need another drink."

"Please," Loki agreed.

\-----------

The Grandmaster didn't come to him all night. Loki did not know if it was because he was giving Valkyrie leeway to play, and eventually he'd consumed enough alcohol that he honestly could not care less. Occasionally, Loki would feel that piercing gaze and would turn to find the Grandmaster's eyes on him with a fond smile. But the man never approached, and he never spoke to either of them.

The conversations of the party guests progressively changed into something more physically intimate, and soon more people were unclothed than clothed. The few times someone had attempted to approach his chair to request to join in, Valkyrie had firmly turned them down. She, too, had disrobed, her eyes growing more glazed the drunker she became. After she guided his cock inside her, she grasped the sides of his face and kissed him deeply. Loki's veins were filled with a pleasant hum. He wished his hands were free, so he could touch her.

"Find me again," he panted, then gasped as she ground down, warm walls gripping the sides of his cock. "After tonight. Please."

"I don't think I'm going to like you very much when I'm sober," she admitted.

"It's a good thing you're a terrible drunk, then."

She laughed, her forehead pressed against his shoulder. They fucked and fucked until she fell asleep against his side. When he woke in the morning, sticky and head pounding and tongue thick in his mouth, she was gone.


	3. Chapter 3

He was brought back to his cell, the cuffs finally removed from his aching wrists. The routine began all over again. His pride stung when he was summoned for the pre-fight preparations, when his armor and weapons were returned to him. Now that he was no longer drunk, the Grandmaster's rejection of his company made something inside him burn.

But the guards did not lead him away to the holding area for the fights. Instead, the door opened again, and Valkyrie entered. She looked him up and down, then jerked her head to indicate the door. "Come on. No death combat for you tonight. The Grandmaster's said you're to train with a partner instead."

Loki followed her through the barrier, his head still aching from the night before. "And why were _you_ sent to fetch me?" The idea that he had not been enjoyable enough to warrant a second night with the Grandmaster humiliated him enough to dull any relief he felt at her appearance.

She ignored his sharp tone and smirked. "I'm here to make sure your ass doesn't get flattened when you meet him."

She'd turned away again, so she didn't see Loki's steps falter as her words sank in, as an inkling began in his mind. He forced himself forward, and was brought to a smaller arena, one the Grandmaster had set aside for training. And in the center, violently swinging his fists and dodging away from a hanging metal sphere that was larger than he was, stood the Hulk.

Loki stopped completely as Valkyrie moved forward, his hands tight on his knives, body tensed so hard he was nearly thrumming. He'd already stepped into the room, so any attempted contact with the energy barrier at the exit would cause the obedience disc to charge. He couldn't run.

Neither of their eyes were on him. He immediately shifted an illusion into existence, and moved himself to the far side of the room.

The Hulk slammed his fist into the sphere again, and the burst of energy that flowed outward revealed it to be covered in some sort of shielding, likely to mitigate the beast's power and prevent him from destroying it outright. Loki pressed his back into the wall and struggled not to flinch as another savage punch produced a burst of sparks.

Valkyrie approached the Hulk with an easy, friendly familiarity. "Hey, big guy. I've brought you your partner."

The Hulk punched the sphere again in clear agitation. "No partner. Hulk win alone."

Valkyrie laughed. "That's true enough. This set up is definitely more for his sake than yours."

The words broke through some of the anticipatory fear that clouded Loki's brain. Had the Grandmaster decided to pair him with the Hulk to decrease the chances of him dying in combat?

 _Won't he be surprised when my flattened corpse is presented to him,_ Loki thought with a gulp.

"Come on," Valkyrie tried, "the boss says that if you don't want him, you can smash him as soon as the first fight's over. But I really hope you don't, because for whatever stupid reason I think I'm starting to like him."

Loki frowned. Starting to like him? Despite his drunken words the night before when he'd begged for her continued company, he hadn't really thought a single night of sex would be enough to sway her. She'd been far more aloof on Sakaar in the first timeline, closed off and determined to die.

Though Loki at that time had been mostly focused on keeping his position in the Grandmaster's good graces to care overmuch about what she was doing until it had threatened his position.

The Hulk turned and stared at Valkyrie, his large brow pinched in dissatisfaction. Then his eyes finally went to Loki's double.

Loki held his breath.

The Hulk roared in rage and ripped the large metal sphere from its chain, sending vibrations through the walls with the sudden violence.

"Puny god!"

Loki's double quailed, and then burst out of existence as the sphere crashed through it and caused a heavy burst of fresh ozone scent as it bounced off a wall with a loud crack. The Hulk caught the sphere on its way back.

"Puny god lies," the Hulk told Valkyrie, lips bared into a snarl, still holding the sphere aloft in his hands.

"But I won't," she said. "Not to you. And I'll kick his ass myself if he hurts you. Loki, stop hiding."

Loki did not reveal himself, his heartbeat frantic at the idea of facing the Hulk's rage head on. He'd been lucky enough the beast had not killed him when he had brought the Chitauri to Earth. He remembered very clearly the sensation of his spine impacting the ground repeatedly, the immense pain as he had gone into shock and became incapable of movement.

The Hulk growled and rolled his shoulders in preparation. "Hulk beat the room."

Loki panicked. "Wait!" He slammed his eyes shut and revealed himself. 

The room went silent. The seconds stretched on with no resulting roar, no pounding of feet racing towards him.

Cautiously, Loki cracked open an eye to see the Hulk and Valkyrie staring at him. 

Valkyrie looked between them. "So. You two know each other."

Hulk grunted. "Loki bad. Attack Earth."

Valkyrie frowned in confusion. "Earth?"

Loki tensed indignantly, shame and annoyance winning out a bit over fear. "Yes, well, if memory serves, _Hulk_ has attacked Earth once or twice."

That struck a nerve. Loki just barely managed to leap out of the way as the sphere came for his head. Rubble exploded outward into the room, stone and scrap pelting his back. 

When he raised his head and shook the hair out of his eyes, Valkyrie stood in front of him with arms crossed. She gave him a light kick on his shoulder. "If you're going to be an asshole, I'll just let him pummel you."

"This is ridiculous," Loki snarled, clenching his hands around his knives to hide his trembling fingers. "He's too savage for the cooperation that would be required for this to work." _Thor isn't here,_ he thought. Thor would know how to reach the beast. Loki was an enemy.

She reached down and hooked her fingers under Loki's armor, easily hefting him to his feet. " _You're _the only one picking fights. I spar with him every week."__

____

____

Loki cleared his throat. "You - what?" 

"Angry girl fight good," the Hulk confirmed. 

Valkyrie patted the front of Loki's armor. "For nearly two years." 

He recovered from his surprise and sneered. "Then please, feel free to partner with the beast yourself. You are an expert warrior maiden, after all. When you're not being an expert drunk." 

She narrowed her eyes and for a moment Loki thought she would punch him. But she just pulled Loki around, and roughly shoved him towards the Hulk back first. 

Loki stumbled with the force, and when he managed to come to a stop he felt a warm and heavy exhale on the back of his head, followed by a familiar growl. 

__He froze, not even daring to breathe._ _

Valkyrie did not look concerned. She pulled out a knife and held it out at the ready. With her free hand, she beckoned. "Come on then, work together. Let's see if you can get a hit in on the expert drunk." 

__Loki carefully turned his head to glance at the Hulk in his periphery, but the beast had turned his gaze completely away in a huff. Loki had not previously engaged with the Hulk when on Sakaar, and certainly not ever as teammates with just the two of them. But seeing as he was not currently existing in a crater in the ground, he could tentatively conclude that the time free to stretch from Banner's form had truly been favorable to the Hulk's temperament._ _

__Perhaps, if Loki presented himself as a friend, even without the developed sense of tolerance that had occurred in a previous timeline, the Hulk would not turn on him immediately in the arena. It was infinitely better, after all, to be paired with him than to need to face him head on. And they'd managed a tenuous alliance in the end, before...__

_"We have a Hulk."_

__Loki carefully began to turn to face the Hulk, wincing and holding his hands up in placation when the beast growled angrily at the movement. He quickly vanished his knives. The Hulk's chest heaved, his eyes narrowed in distrust. Loki carefully lowered a single hand until he was holding it out with his palm and fingers flat._ _

The Hulk snorted derisively and looked away, but only for a moment. When his gaze moved back to Loki's hand there was something new in his eyes - curiosity, and a bit of longing. 

_Oh, for pity's sake._

__Loki bit back the scathing words that wanted to escape. The beast, it turned out, had the mind of a child. That made Loki's defeat at his hands even more of an embarrassment._ _

__The thought derailed as his hand was encased in a giant green fist._ _

__Loki's heart seized, but the grip did not tighten, nor did the Hulk use his leverage to slam Loki against the walls and floor. He simply gave one small shake and then released._ _

__"Partners," the Hulk grumbled reluctantly._ _

__Loki breathed out a shaky sigh of relief, then rolled his eyes as Valkyrie's smug "Told you!" rang out._ _

____

\-----------

Valkyrie did not have the power of flight, but she might as well have for all that she bounded off walls and jumped and dodged attacks. Loki knew she had possibly centuries more of experience in combat, in war. That did not help the steadily growing frustration as neither he nor the Hulk could get in close enough for a blow, and all projectile weapons were easily and efficiently deflected.

The Hulk, predictably, grew impatient and neglectful of his partner the more frustrated he became. More than once Loki found himself thrown into a wall or stunned by a carelessly swinging arm. Finally, bruised and angry, Loki slashed out with a knife at the same time he jumped back to dodge an incoming green fist.

The Hulk grasped at his bleeding knuckles with a roar and turned rage-filled eyes in Loki's direction.

"You were going to hit me again, imbecile," Loki hissed, though his limbs trembled with anticipation of the Hulk's violence. "I can't fight the both of you at once. At least have the decency to pay attention when you beat me."

"He's right, big guy," Valkyrie called from across the room. "I know you like to smash, but you have to remember the puny god is on your side."

The Hulk grunted and gave a nod, his eyes skirting to Loki and away again. "Sorry, partner."

Loki's head spun. What was happening? "It's...all right."

The Hulk gave a little smile.

Then he lifted Loki into the air with his giant fist, ignoring the resulting yelp and frantic squirming. "Hulk throw. Partner attack Angry Girl."

Loki squawked. "What?"

Loki was thrown through the air at such speed that Valkyrie was not fast enough to dodge before he came crashing into her chest and sent her onto her back and sliding across the floor with the force. She brought a knife to Loki's neck at the same time he pressed one of his own against her jugular.

A smug smile stretched her lips. "Good."

"We win," Hulk said.

"You should really consider making that your signature move," Valkyrie said after they had both moved to their feet, Loki still shaken in the aftermath. "Give it some sort of name, the Grandmaster will like that."

Loki grimaced. He was _not_ calling it Get Help.

\-----------

Loki was allowed to train with the Hulk and Valkyrie for three more nights. The Hulk still became distracted or in fact far too focused to leave Loki entirely unscathed, but the level of consideration he did manage enabled Loki to at least dodge all the rest. Loki still snapped angrily nearly every time, growing more bold with the beast the longer he went without being seriously injured. Sometimes the Hulk would lose his temper completely as they argued, but instead of hitting Loki, would turn and cause damage to the arena.

Valkyrie would forego any sort of intervention at these moments and simply watch them with an unimpressed expression. If their spats ran longer than a few minutes, she would make herself comfortable with a bottle and remain equally as useless. Even more annoyingly, the unsteadiness afforded by her renewed drunkenness after such arguments did not make her much easier to defeat.

Despite those small bumps, Loki's confidence had increased. If he was allowed to stay paired with the Hulk, there would be absolutely no opponent they could not defeat, especially coupled with Loki's knowledge of the fighters the Grandmaster had on hand. He'd been very careful to instruct the Hulk on the magic-suppressing devices their enemies would employ if the Grandmaster again decided Loki's abilities needed to be taken down a peg. The Hulk was very easy to direct if the direction was to "smash."

Surviving until Thor arrived - and likely became pitted against him in the arena - was looking more and more like an achievable outcome. Loki had not realized how much he had been doubting his ability to get that far until this added assurance had been introduced. He was looking forward to the expression on Thor's face when he realized the Hulk and _Loki_ were teamed up against him. Loki would even make sure to not allow the Hulk to seriously attack Thor.

Well, not overmuch. The thought of seeing the Hulk thrash Thor into the floor up close was just a bit tempting. It wasn't as if his brother would know he'd already suffered through it before. And really, the experience had been integral to Thor discovering his power.

Perhaps by then Loki would have stowed away an obedience disc controller. It was becoming more and more possible that seducing Valkyrie instead of the Grandmaster would be the easiest direction to take for that to happen. Especially since when the Hulk had gone to bed for the night after each session, she would immediately begin to renew her heavy drinking and not only escort Loki back to his cell, but join him inside it.

"Don't think this means anything," Valkyrie said one night as Loki kissed down from her collarbone, rubbing the heel of his hand at the spot above her folds. 

He nipped at her breast and gave her a wide grin. "Of course not."

She grabbed his wrist and clenched her legs about his torso, twisting him under her with brute strength. She slammed his hand, still slick with her fluids, down beside his head. "I mean it," she said. "I won't compromise my position with the Grandmaster."

 _Not for another week or so, perhaps,_ he thought. Out loud, he simply said, "I wouldn't dream of asking you to."

But the change in their relationship was becoming somewhat of an ache, a longing Loki had not felt in a very long time. Small at the moment, but it grew each time she slammed him against the wall and kissed him with drunken fervor. He feared and fought its progression. Despite what he had said to her before, they had not quite been what he would have classified as friends. Allies, yes, or comrades in arms - but not friends. And certainly not anything with the presence of such regular continuous intimacy. 

She'd never claimed to _like_ him before. Not many people did.

And beneath that concern, he also dreaded his brother's upcoming appearance, of needing to deal with his disdain - because in Thor's mind, Loki would have just killed their father. Their history and reconciliation after Sakaar had been completely erased. He supposed he could explain the time loop, but the idea of trying to get Thor to understand and accept the idea that they'd already been through this once was frustrating even in Loki's imaginings of such an event.

His first night of true combat as the Hulk's partner would provide a welcome distraction from those thoughts.

\-----------

As expected, they massacred their opponents. The Grandmaster had spun some tale during their opening about them being tenuous allies, introduced by Scrapper 142, which Loki supposed was true.

He glanced up at one point to see if Valkyrie was watching the display and what she thought of this level of referential storytelling, but her scrap vessel was absent. Loki felt disappointment and a quiet irritation, silently promising himself that he would make his displeasure at her absence known at their next meeting, especially if the reason she had failed to show had anything to do with the copious amounts of alcohol she drank on a nightly basis.

The combat itself went better for Loki than he expected. If he found himself too near the Hulk during a rampage he would just signal the beast of his proximity. More often than not, he would be quickly lifted in a green fist and thrown to relative safety. In that process his momentum would generally send deep slices from his daggers into his opponents. 

When it was over, they stood side by side, their enemies defeated. The roar of the crowd was deafening, and the Hulk wandered the edges of the arena soaking in the praise. Loki rolled his eyes, but inwardly felt a bit proud. He would just chalk it up to fading adrenaline.

The Grandmaster's holographic silhouette appeared in the center of the arena, and the crowd almost immediately quieted down. Loki stared up in confusion and felt nervous as he noted the uncharacteristic expression of deep sorrow on the Grandmaster's face.

"Ladies and gentlemen, my Champion, I have some terrible news."

The crowd quieted even further.

"It seems the woman known as Scrapper 142, the personal trainer and friend of the Incredible Hulk, has been murdered."

The Grandmaster faded from existence at the same time Valkyrie's lifeless body replaced him in the hologram. Loki stared in dawning horror as he took in her blank stare, the trickle of blood that came from the corner of her mouth, and the dagger that had impaled her chest.

The same style of dagger that he held in his hands. The ones custom made especially for his use in the arena.

Her image faded and was replaced again with the Grandmaster. "Recently, I allowed her to train both my Champion and the Lone Wolf together, but...but obviously...that was a mistake." The Grandmaster turned the eyes of his hologram on Loki. "You killed her."

The hologram shut off. Loki gaped at empty air as the crowd began to again roil with cries, this time of rage. 

He turned to the Hulk just as the Hulk turned to him, and blanched at the growing aggression in the beast's eyes.

"Puny god kill Angry Girl," the Hulk said, voice anguished. His face set, and rage overtook him completely as he screamed, "Puny god kill Angry Girl!"

Loki was still in shock, all protests he could make locked behind his utter confusion. Why kill Valkyrie? Why blame Loki? This sort of organized storytelling had never been the Grandmaster's forte before.

And, behind that, pulsing strongly in time with his heart - _She's dead. He killed her. She's dead._

The Hulk came for him. Before he could even move the obedience disc in his neck activated and sent him to the ground. The roar of the crowd matched the roar of the beast, and as Loki's head tilted back he could see the Grandmaster had returned to his viewing area. His eyes locked onto Loki.

The crowd took up a chant.

_"HULK SMASH! HULK SMASH!"_

The Hulk smashed.

\-----------

Loki fell.

Loki landed.

He stared up at the sky, his mind jumbled, filled with the memories of Valkyrie's dead eyes and the Hulk's savagery as he tore Loki to pieces, as bones broke and organs ruptured under giant green fists.

Loki turned over and was sick, acidic bile coating his throat. His limbs ached and his head pounded and his skin felt too tight.

He didn't have time to rest. The scavengers were about to make their way over the hill. Valkyrie would be nearby, looking for her next bounty. He could not let any of them catch him.

Loki fled, moving in a stumbling, desperate haze until his legs better responded to his commands, and then he ran. He ran for miles, until he found a familiar ship, out of place in the scrap heap. The Quinjet. He almost moved on, shying away from the thought of boarding anything that belonged to the Hulk. But more than anything, he needed rest. He ground his jaw and climbed onto the Quinjet, and then he hid aboard, lungs bursting and spots in his eyes, his head in his hands as the memory of his most recent death again caught up to him.

The Grandmaster had murdered Valkyrie, Scrapper 142, his most favored acquisition specialist. The Grandmaster had murdered _Loki,_ with the Hulk as his vessel. Had Loki done something to displease him? Was it punishment for his behavior the night aboard the leisure vessel? But the Grandmaster had invited them both - it did not make sense that he would punish them for only acting as the party dictated they act. And the man's fondness for Valkyrie had seemed to run deep.

Yet, she had been killed.

 _She's alive again,_ he reminded himself, then began to giggle wildly as tears coursed down his face. Somewhere out there, patrolling the trash heaps, having probably just missed him. 

She would have no memory of him. Everything they'd shared, however shallow and carnal and influenced by alcohol, that was gone. Erased from her life.

He was back at the start.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Now begins a downhill slide... next chapter will be posted Thursday.

Loki moved with stealth through the Grandmaster's tower, avoiding all lines of sight and efficiently entering codes to bypass security. His thoughts were one long continuous scream, flashes of his past lives tormenting him in a constant stream. Some distant part of him cringed at his actions, hated his lack of care and planning. A much, much larger part only thought of how very much he wanted to kill every single creature he came across, the guards and partygoers and slaves alike, every being that was complacent in this madness. He wanted to kill himself most of all.

But he would do none of that. He only had one goal.

He found the Grandmaster in the middle of a celebration, toasting to his Champion's latest victory. When he was done, he moved frequently between people, flirting and drinking. 

Loki waited until there was a lull in the crowd to strike.

His dagger slid into soft flesh. Shock filled the Grandmaster's expression and he turned his eyes on Loki, then squinted in pure confusion.

"How?"

Loki stabbed him again so violently that blood flecked his face, and the partygoers screamed and moved away. 

Loki's mind was fire.

A pressure at his back and then all consuming pain as his body began to disintegrate. He screamed but held the knife in the Grandmaster's belly until his fingers melted.

\-----------

Loki fell.

The screaming in his mind would not stop. On and on the noise went, and he roared to the sky as he climbed to his feet just to try to drown it out.

This time, he waited near Topaz after he infiltrated the party. When the Grandmaster came near enough, Loki wrested the melt stick from her grasp and launched himself forward. 

He pressed the stick to the Grandmaster's chest and activated it.

Nothing happened.

The Grandmaster stared at him in surprise, his eyes going to the melt stick and then back to Loki. 

Something metal clamped over Loki's neck, encircling it completely.

_"You will never be a god."_

Loki dropped the melt stick and grasped the metal over his neck as he thrashed in a panic. Electricity lit up his nerves and stilled his struggles with white heat. He only became aware as a second pole with a ring attached was locked above the first one. More guards moved in and subdued him with magnetic cuffs as he recovered, locking his arms behind him at wrist and elbow and forcing him to his knees with many hands.

The pressure against his throat was unbearable. He frantically gasped in air, unaware of anything but the supreme need to free his neck. He struggled until spots danced in his vision, succeeding in throwing off a few of the guards with a quick blast of his magic.

The Grandmaster's voice sounded far away. "Hey, hey. Topaz, get them something. No, not that one! Just calm them down, don't kill them."

The sting of a needle in his arm, and then a sensation of warm heaviness blanketed his body. The screaming in his mind quieted and his muscles lost tension.

Fingers on his chin tilted his head up. The Grandmaster waved in greeting and peered into his face. "Uh, hello. I'm afraid that little piece of equipment doesn't work on me. Wouldn't exactly do to just leave that lying around for, for anyone to grab. Wow, you are...you are _very_ pretty. Get him - her? - up for me."

Loki was pulled to his feet, his shoulders already burning from the cruel restraints. The Grandmaster stepped forward and examined him, his hands going over Loki's body, pinching to test for muscle tone, rubbing invasively over his torso, his thighs. 

"Here we go," the Grandmaster said, cupping Loki's genitals through his clothes. "Male, definitely - probably male."

The fingers clenched inwards and Loki grimaced and tried to squirm away from the touch. The Grandmaster only grasped at his arm to pull him closer, until they were nearly chest to chest. 

Dark eyes stared dispassionately. "None of that. You broke in here - congratulations, by the way, no one's managed that in centuries - but I'm afraid now there will be some consequences, just so people remember exactly why." 

His intrigued stare focused with an intensity that sent Loki's skin crawling, and his eyes seemed to grow darker and more opaque the longer he gazed. Loki's heart seized as the room felt as if it had fallen away, that he would take a step and fall if not for the anchor in those eyes. 

It felt as if he was being drawn into the Void all over again.

Then there was a new sensation, subtle at first. It felt as if dozens of creeping tendrils were sliding over his body. They wrapped about his limbs and torso, tightening and twisting against him. He could not pull away from the Grandmaster's gaze to look, but he knew that they came from this display of magic - something the Grandmaster had never felt the need to reveal before now. Loki pressed back at the feeling with his own magic, his power sluggish from drugs. The side of the Grandmaster's lip quirked and then the tendrils suddenly crushed against Loki's chest. His lungs could no longer inflate against the pressure. Fear lanced through the drugged haze, bright and overwhelming. His own magic thrashed in a frantic struggle as he tried again and again to draw breath. Darkness closed in on his vision. The Grandmaster watched him fade with a pleased smile.

Then all at once the moment broke and the room once again became solid. Loki nearly collapsed as he was released, but several pairs of hands caught him. He gaped desperately as he sucked in breath after breath.

The Grandmaster's smile became outright delighted. "Yes, good, good. You're exactly what I'm looking for. What a find, what a find, and you just fell right into my lap." The Grandmaster glanced to Topaz. "Ready the city center, get the word out. We'll start in a few hours, get things going. He's strong, top up that dose you just gave him. But leave him his magic, we might even have an all nighter on our hands. Good to get some fresh air once in a while. Which reminds me - make sure the air purifiers are set up. Don't want the, the smell of the trash heaps to ruin the mood."

Another stab against his arm, and his body grew weaker still. Now no longer trapped by the Grandmaster's magic, Loki struggled to get words out. "What...what are you..."

A hood covered his head before he could finish, heavy fabric pulled tight against his face.

The alarm that followed was dull, muted under the influence of whatever drugs he'd been given. 

As he was dragged away by the guards, he could hear the Grandmaster call, "See you in a bit, darling. You're going to do amazingly."

\-----------

He was going to be publically executed.

Loki knew that, now, though he remained blind from the hood that covered his head. He'd been staked down outdoors on his knees by the poles attached to his neck. The panic was returning as the drugs began to fade, as his head began to pound from adrenaline overuse and dehydration. The hood restricted his air, sealing over his mouth and nostrils if he inhaled too deeply. He could feel the heat of Sakaar's sun beat down on his back.

There would be no way to talk himself out of this. Attacking the Grandmaster was a capital offense, he knew that. He just had assumed that if he failed, he would be killed immediately on the spot.

No one would rescue him, because no one knew him. Thor would not arrive for weeks.

The sounds of surrounding people steadily increased until it was nearly deafening. It still wasn't enough to drown out the sheer terror of his thoughts.

The Grandmaster came to see him one final time before they started. The hood was removed, and Loki felt the relief of fresh air at the same time he slammed his eyes shut as the sudden exposure to natural light burned. 

As if that would be the biggest concern of the day.

When he managed to open his eyes again, he stared up at the Grandmaster as absolute hatred consumed his mind. Trembling wracked his body.

Next to the Grandmaster stood his personal assistants, but they did not hold Loki's attention as much as the large creature that was with them. It was wearing a flat, black mask to make itself featureless.

The Grandmaster gestured at Loki with a happy grin. "What do you think? He's got some magic, feels strong, probably speedy healing, good set of organs."

A large hand gripped the underside of his jaw and the black mask grew close. Loki bared his teeth, numb and slow fingers desperately searching the manacles on his wrists for weakness. When he reached for his magic he felt the invisible tendrils of the Grandmaster return to combat him, coiling and keeping it restrained.

His jaw was released and the feeling of the tendrils grew softer. "He will last," rumbled the masked creature.

"Leave his eyes," the Grandmaster said. "They're extremely pretty. His tongue can be removed after uh, let's say hour four. If there's no begging by that point we can probably call it."

"I will find a way to kill you," Loki promised, even as he braced for the Grandmaster to again crush him with magic at the words. In the back of his mind, he hoped for it. A quicker death was the better option.

The Grandmaster looked taken aback. "You must be quite insane," he said, as if Loki's anger was unwarranted. To the executioner, he said, "Make sure you do a lot of neck stuff. He seems to hate that. Carefully, though - we don't want any premature passing, and he needs to stay conscious." 

The creature nodded and moved behind Loki, its footsteps wandering away. The Grandmaster gestured and one of his assistants set a cushioned mat at his feet. He crouched on it on one knee, his eyes once again boring into Loki's. The tendrils did not grow suffocating, but spread enough to lock up his body entirely. Loki felt his magic thrashing and twisting within him as pressure ruthlessly crushed it down. He gasped.

The Grandmaster's face seemed to have turned to stone. "I want you to know, this whole - kill me thing you tried. It's frankly unacceptable. Sakaar is a place of, of welcoming, and I'm kind of integral to that. So, this all - what's happening now, what's going to happen, it's really only what you deserve."

He released Loki and got to his feet, turning away without another word. The creature with the mask returned and Loki was stabbed with a needle. Again a fuzziness overtook his limbs. There was a great rumbling behind him, the sound of hydraulics and large machinery at work. The floor beneath his knees vibrated harshly, and a shadow fell over him.

The city began to cheer in excitement.

Loki looked out among a crowd of strangers as his vision began to blur. Small box-like electronic devices raised around him, and then his image greatly enlarged was projected in a hologram above the city. The tears in his eyes were painfully obvious at that size, on display for every citizen of Sakaar who had arrived to watch.

A number appeared in the lower corner. As Loki watched, it began to steadily decrease. The countdown to his torture and demise.

He shut his eyes, wishing for the hood so he would not have to see. He could feel tears course down his face and ground his teeth in anger at his own weakness. 

_You're a failure,_ he thought. Every decision he'd made, from the Tesseract until now, doomed to badness. 

At one point he opened his eyes again and thought he saw Valkyrie amongst the crowd, but as his heart leapt and he blinked rapidly to try to clear his vision, he could not catch sight of her again.

It did not matter, he reminded himself as he directed his vision back to the ground. She would not know him. And even if she did, the Grandmaster would just as soon have her head all the same if it pleased him. 

Norns, if he could just stay dead this time.

\------------

He was moved, eventually, lifted from his kneeling position on the stage by guards and forced to stand. The shadow that had fallen over him was a gigantic contraption, a ring of metal set into the stage that stood tall against the sky. Desperation drove him to struggle despite his drugged state, to lash out wildly with his magic. His spells faded as soon as they formed, and he could feel the Grandmaster's influence like a fist around his heart.

He was forced beneath the arching curve, his arms released and his wrists and ankles encased in shackles attached to chains that retracted until he was strung tight and spread eagle. His lungs burned in his chest at the stretched position.

When he'd imagined what his execution on Asgard would be like, the image had been very similar to this. Hundreds of people crying out for his blood, joyful for his death. A fitting sentence for his crimes, for his very continued existence as a Jotun in the house of Odin.

Loki's image in the sky was overtaken by the Grandmaster as he began the opening ceremonial speech. The executioner stood at the ready, his tools set out beside him.

"And now, the criminal will be put to death."

Loki stared out at the crowd, and tried to numb himself to their cheers.

\------------

He screamed. Of course he screamed. The Grandmaster was thousands of years old and had public executions performed for recreational entertainment, he knew the beats, would use the very best torturers. He'd known Loki's abilities, had guessed his weaknesses as soon as he'd looked at him.

The screams died down as Loki lost energy as the hours went on, as his limbs were crushed and torn, as his skin was burnt and flayed, his flesh split to expose innards and bone to air. A torture device set about his neck responded to signals from his executioner to tighten and loosen, to send spines of metal digging into his flesh, to inject venom and acid into his veins, to send blood pouring from his neck. He saw himself die a thousand times, his throat crushed by Thanos again and again while Thor looked on.

Perhaps Thanos hadn't truly killed him. Maybe it was the power of the Infinity Stones combined that had doomed his spirit to suffer on Sakaar for all eternity.

As his tongue was roughly clamped outside of his mouth in preparation for its removal, he saw Valkyrie again in the crowd. He was so delirious with pain, she might have been a hallucination. He squinted and blinked blood from his eyes. He thought he saw a glint of light reflected off a knife in the crowd.

It flew through the air and pierced his heart. He cried out at the additional pain, as his heart struggled to continue beating. The sounds of chaos shifted into confusion and anger, as the Grandmaster and executioner struggled to find the culprit. She was already gone.

Numbness spread in Loki's limbs. It was not death coming for him like he thought, but a pain reliever coated on the blade. Still, each breath became more of a struggle, and darkness closed in on the edges of his vision.

The Grandmaster's furious eyes above him were the last thing he saw before the world faded away.

\-----------

Loki fell.

Loki crashed into earth.

For long moments he stayed on the ground, a lethargy in his limbs and mind. He'd been tortured to death for the entertainment of the Sakaarian masses. And now he was alive again, what felt like not moments later.

The scavengers were about to approach. He could care less. Let them eat him. At least he knew that if he screamed, they would knock him out. They would not leave him alive for hours to bleat like a desperate animal as he was worn down by agony. He would be unaware of his death, of his skin and muscle being torn from his body.

He wanted to be unaware forever.

As the minutes dragged on and he remained alone, Loki felt his brow pull together in confusion. They should have come by now. In every last iteration the same group of creatures had combed over his landing site, driving him to act in one way or another, but this time they were conspicuously absent.

Eventually, his curiosity got the better of him and he sat up with a groan. There was a shaking in his limbs that would not quite dissipate, and a heavy exhaustion in his mind. He struggled to his feet, tried not to remember...anything. A cascade of horrors was being built in his mind, clamoring for his focus. He wanted nothing more than to collapse back to the ground and scream and weep for years.

But something had changed. The only question was what.

He stepped forward and lost his footing. He crashed to his knee and felt sharp debris slice into his leg. He pulled the piece of metal loose and muttered a curse at his weakness. There didn't seem to be a rhyme or reason to his condition each subsequent time the portal spat him back out on this hell of a planet, but it did seem to become a bit more difficult each time. As if his body, while unmarked, remembered his many deaths and their methods.

His limbs would still not stop their violent shaking. Grimly, he used a large block of metal to drag himself back up, and made his way across the garbage heaps with more care. He did not doubt he was weak enough that his magic would not respond if he called to it. If he encountered anyone, it might turn out he would be taken for food anyway.

He would not even entertain the idea of the possibility of being taken for anything else. He would slit his own throat before he allowed that to happen.

But he remained unmolested the entire journey, despite his slow and difficult progress, until he again found the Quinjet and hid aboard. He shapeshifted into Thor with a great amount of effort, and used his brother's handprint and password to fool the vessel into closing tight.

He collapsed into an unconscious heap before the ramp had even fully shut.

\---------

He woke gasping, the edge of a horrific nightmare clawing at his mind, Thanos crushing his neck now melding with his new memories of being tortured to death and the Hulk ripping him to pieces. His heart took a very long time to return to normal function, during which time he kept curled on his side on the hard floor and stared unseeing at the opposite wall of the vessel as tremors wracked him.

Night had fallen. With no public execution planned, the citizens of Sakaar would be gathered at the arena and watching the fights. It was as good a time as ever to leave the Quinjet.

His attempt to cloak himself with magic left him dizzy and slumped on the floor, a thin whine exiting his throat. He would have to make do with natural stealth and keep to the shadows. He quietly slid from the ship and moved through the mostly empty city, stealing supplies.

But menacing shapes lurked at the edges of his vision, and more than once he'd whirled with a knife in hand to find no one there.

He felt he was going mad again.

He returned to the Quinjet and closed it tight, but his fear would not abate. He had gathered food, but he could not bring himself to eat through the nausea that clawed at his stomach. He paced in agitation, and ran through multiple ideas and plans in his mind before discounting each in turn. He could not risk getting caught again. His mind would not survive another horrific death. He would be lost forever, as surely as if Thanos had never plucked him from the Void.

He ran through plans upon plans until morning, until the citizens returned to their homes after the long night, and the city again went quiet as they slept. He too was exhausted, but he refused to rest, even though his trembling only worsened as the day went on.

When night fell again, he finally settled. He'd been going about things the wrong way, struggling to be different, struggling to change. What he needed to do was keep things as similar as possible to his first appearance on the planet. That way would, at least, lead to a final escape.

The only problem was that he had already begun working to get himself in the Grandmaster's graces at this point. He needed to restart.

He managed the strength to slit the arteries in his throat. In the quiet of his mind that followed, he dimly hoped that maybe he would not come back.

\-----------

He came back.

There was no time for a breakdown. Loki stretched his mind, tried to filter through his lives, to pinpoint the path taken in the original experience. He was tired, and the long scream that plagued his mind had returned, but the easy death did not leave him as weakened as the others. He moved towards the tower.

That night, the closer he came to his goal of meeting the Grandmaster, the more the screaming in his mind increased. Several times he had to gaze around to confirm it was indeed in his head and not the melt stick being used on a hapless victim.

The Grandmaster found him, the same as the first time, when he was drinking and mingling with a few of the attendees, keeping up the casual front of a traveler who couldn't imagine he belonged anywhere else. When the familiar scent of spices approached, he turned his head with a put upon expression of pleasant surprise and admiration.

"Hi there," the Grandmaster said, settling himself down beside him and resting a hand on Loki's knee. "I don't think I know your name."

The screaming in his mind reached an excruciating pitch. 

Loki smiled.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter posted this Saturday, and then the story will be switched to once a week (Saturday) only updates.

He could not keep it one hundred percent identical, not when his mind was tormented so fully by his own memories. But he doggedly tried, ignored the constant nausea and state of fight or flight, worried the Grandmaster would see, worried he would somehow know, and Loki would end up on the chopping block again.

The night that would lead to his first round of sex with the Grandmaster was almost a relief in its sameness to the original timeline. Here now he knew what to expect. He told himself that the Grandmaster was not so mercurial as to change his preferences entirely based on a few small quirks on Loki's part. In fact, he seemed to enjoy the added skittishness, and even then, Loki remembered being fairly skittish before. 

He stood in some of the Grandmaster's largest and tamest-looking quarters, his mind far away as the man kept up a running commentary while he mixed their drinks. Loki had shed his Asgardian garb and was dressed in leather armor to better match the color scheme of Sakaar, though still muted to the chaotic combination of bright colors that the Grandmaster favored. He'd avoided the Grandmaster's more intimate attentions for days, joining parties and interacting but never sexually participating, until he was sure he could convince the man to have him alone.

His head and jaw ached, a near constant presence in the days upon days of stress. He remembered thinking he could make a home here, even and eventually with Thor's unexpected presence. A last stopping point for the princes of Asgard. It had been a driving point for him in the original timeline to even further ensure his high standing with the Grandmaster - Thor would be impatient, and would not wait the weeks required to best input the plan. 

He remembered the rage and frustration when Thor would not even _listen_ , overshadowing what gladness Loki had of his brother's survival by ignoring Loki's attempts at reminding Thor of their father's faults and instead acting like Loki's had been the greater crime, as if _Loki_ had been the one to doom all of Asgard. When Loki had for years been slipping out of his murderous rage in his time presenting as a benevolent king.

The clink of ice against glass heralded the Grandmaster's approach. "Look at you, gorgeous, you look strained stiff. Here, try this, it's - it's full of great things."

 _You mean drugs,_ Loki thought, as he took the drink with a grateful smile. "I see. What exactly, if you don't mind my asking?"

Loki played out the Grandmaster's answer in his mind before the man spoke. "Just some - just some bits and bobs to make sure your night is more enjoyable. Little aphrodisiac to enhance things, little something to calm the nerves - it'll help with that brain pain you've been nursing, poor thing. Some hurts can be erotic, sometimes substantially so, but I've met thousands of species and none of them seem to exactly favor that particular - heh - headache."

Loki pasted on a grin of amusement and raised his glass to his lips. The liquid within was bright blue, and when he sipped it the flavor was at first tangy sour and then sweet. He remembered this drink. It would do what the Grandmaster said, a fairly gentle introduction to this level of their relationship. The Grandmaster at this stage was still trying to interpret Loki's desires in as much as he was trying to bring him around to his way of seeing things. 

"It's delicious," Loki said, though he was far more interested in the buzzing feeling that followed. He took a greater swallow, and tried unsuccessfully to steady his hand around the glass.

The Grandmaster's hand, warm and gentle, covered his. "Oh, Lo-honey, those pesky shakes of yours are back. Don't worry, we'll turn those into - turn those into something a bit more geared towards pleasure, hmm?"

A downright chaste kiss to Loki's cheek and the Grandmaster moved to a curtained-off closet, one Loki knew contained all manner of sexual devices. He'd realized in the first timeline, after seeing the Grandmaster's other rooms, that the more intimidating looking accessories and toys were only on blatant display for the Grandmaster's more confident and experienced conquests.

Now the man only returned with a strip of blue cloth, some magnetic cuffs padded generously for comfort. Loki quickly downed the rest of his drink, the ice clacking against his teeth.

In the original timeline, he'd protested the suggestion of restraints for their first coupling, wary of being so completely at the Grandmaster's mercy. His fear of the man now had grown tenfold, but his mind was also too tired to fight. If it had been his choice, he would submit without complaint, let the Grandmaster use his body as he wished. 

He'd experienced being tortured to death. This, by comparison, would be easy - welcome, even. A low thrum of arousal coursed through him as the drugs did their work, his skin flushing and his breathing harder to steady for a reason other than fear.

But he had a script he planned on sticking to as much as possible. "Ah," he said, eyeing the items the Grandmaster held. "I would - would really rather _not_ be bound, if it's all the same to you."

"What?" The Grandmaster set the restraints on the bed and moved into Loki's space, blue fabric still clutched in his fist. "Come here." He gazed deeply into Loki's eyes with a frown. "Someone's hurt you before, haven't they?" 

Loki held back the wild laughter that wanted to escape - the sheer _hypocrisy_ in hindsight, in the Grandmaster's statement. He'd been weak to those words before, knowing deep down the danger of the man, and savoring that almost as much as the kindness he offered. 

The Grandmaster ran a hand through Loki's hair. "My sweet speck of stardust, you know you can trust me to do what's best for you, right? Very often that's, well it's going to coincide with what's best for me, to be honest. We can always - can always get you another drink, if you're feeling shy? Unless you'd rather we didn't-" 

"No," Loki interrupted, and at the Grandmaster's expression he hurried on, "I'm right where I want to be." 

"Yes you are," the Grandmaster said, his hands bringing the blindfold up to Loki's face as he drew in for a kiss. 

__

\---------

The Grandmaster eased him into suggestions of sexual experimentation, and Loki protested and then gave in and then protested again at all the right moments. He ignored the part of his heart that sang with longing at the ready acceptance, that enjoyed being so pushed to his limits in ways he would not have thought he could endure. Sakaar did not want for pleasure, either in its devices or drugs. Loki was hollowed out by the end of the night, barely able to move. Meanwhile, the Grandmaster remained smug and pleased and totally in control of his own faculties.

He was invited to the fights, to the parties, and was glad of the drugs that clouded his mind at the same time he was careful to avoid taking so much he lost control completely. He could not afford to suddenly start spouting about his reincarnation experiences under the influence of some heavy substance. As the days went on, he even managed a modicum of relaxation, his emotions filtering down into simple heavy nervousness instead of a constant state of terror. The scream that filled his mind faded into the background as he grew used to its constant presence.

He veered strongly back into terror the day Thor was about to arrive.

He needed this to work. He could not go through everything again.

He forced himself to attend the same party, to drink the same drink, to tell the same tale. The tremors in his hands came and went, but to those around him this was just a normal occurrence in his behavior. 

And then he finally heard the voice for which he'd been waiting.

"Loki!"

Now came time for the hard part. Everything had to go exactly the same. Thor would need to think Loki had abandoned him, and he would need to get beaten by the Hulk. Loki could not fail, or _Thor_ would very undoubtedly ruin everything.

Seeing his brother, subdued and frustrated but hale and with both of his eyes sent a strange combination of longing and anxiety bursting through Loki. The last time they'd seen each other, Thanos had been about to kill them. Then everything had reset with Loki's death.

Presenting himself the very image of well relaxed and happy was difficult, but it was easy to deter any of the concern that grew in Thor's eyes by angering him with his flippant and seemingly uncaring behavior. When Thor was taken away, the Grandmaster called him close, and Loki solidified his mask of pleasantness.

One more night and day, that was all he needed to perform.

He visited Thor in the prisoner's quarters, and he struggled not to falter in anxiety when describing the savageness of the Grandmaster's Champion. That feeling did not fade as the day progressed, and he nearly vomited on the Grandmaster's couch as he watched the Hulk beat Thor senseless. Thankfully, the Grandmaster was too engrossed in the battle to noticed.

The next day, when the Grandmaster called Loki and Valkyrie and ordered them to hunt down Thor after his escape, Loki felt his mood lighten, even with the threat of public execution hanging over his head. Even though the scream in his mind still almost drowned out his focus to all other things.

That didn't matter. He knew the script. 

He gladly threatened Valkyrie, reinstated her memories, and was eagerly prepared to take the beating that followed. If his edge was a bit more wild, his movements a bit more vicious, his grip on her forehead a bit harsher, that was fine.

She fell back from the memory, and then leapt forward to pin him on his back. He flinched instinctively, but inwardly he begged for the darkness that would still his thoughts.

The blow did not fall. She'd hesitated, her fist still raised above his face.

The longer Loki went without being knocked unconscious, the more the kernel of constant fear he felt began to expand. It was different. 

It had to stay the same.

It _had_ to.

He tried to throw her off, to inspire her to attack, but she lowered her fist and held him down, thighs clenched around his torso. The trembling he'd been suppressing returned full force. He felt his head would split open with the force of the screaming within it.

"What are you waiting for," he finally hissed, desperate. 

She dismounted.

_No, no,_ no. 

Loki felt his mind begin to crumble. Tears filled his eyes. The stress of everything swelled around him until he curled tight under the force of it, his body burning with miserable rage. He howled into his knees. 

"Lackey." Her hand on his shoulder, shaking him. 

"Get off me," he snarled. "It had to be the same, damn you." 

Valkyrie scowled. "What had to be the same? What the fuck is wrong with you?" 

He laughed and then gasped in a sob as the anger drained from him. "Everything. Everything." 

Valkyrie sat back on her heels. "I was going to drag you back to my room in chains, but now I'm pretty sure you're too pathetic for that. You were trying to mindfuck _me,_ why are you the one falling to pieces?" 

"I'm always falling," Loki muttered, ignoring the tears that flowed from his eyes. And he would fall, again and again and _again._

He heard her sigh. She put an arm under him and began to pull him up. He raised his knife to slash at her and she stopped him with a grip on his forearm hard enough to bruise, twisting to inspire him to drop the knife. He ground his teeth and held on. 

She glared. "Keep on and maybe I will knock you out. I'm trying to help you." She paused, and a look of confusion overtook her. She looked off to the side, her frown deepening. "Why am I trying to help you?" She turned back to him. "What the hell did you do to me?" 

Loki finally looked at her, searching her face. "It's you," he said as he realized. "This...this failure, it's not my fault. _You_ are the one that is different." 

She raised her eyebrows. "I'm what?" 

Loki tried to pull himself together. "We've barely spoken, and suddenly you've taken a liking to me." 

She barked a laugh of disbelief. "I wouldn't go that far." 

He scoffed in return. "I just threatened your life and tore the worst memory of your existence from your mind and forced you to relive it and you're - what, planning to give me a slap on the wrist?" 

"I..." She trailed off. Finally, her hand released his wrist, allowing him to cradle it close. "You seem...familiar." 

"It's not resetting completely," Loki said. "Something is carrying over." 

"What isn't resetting? You're not making sense." 

Loki laughed. "It's a very long story. One I will happily tell you after you find Thor. You may still set me up as a peace offering." 

She gave him a sharp look. He gave her a sharp smile. 

She helped him to his feet. He was still laughing on and off, though he tried to keep it quiet to prevent drawing attention. 

"This better be good," she muttered as she dragged him down the hall. 

__

\---------

When they were all gathered in Valkyrie's apartment, Loki told them everything. Thor eyed him in clear distrust and Banner with unabashed curiosity as he explained what he knew of the time loop. The human clearly wanted to discuss the possible sources and science of Loki's condition. When he attempted it his voice quickly trailed off and he quieted when Loki shot him a murderous glance.

"I am not here to satisfy your curiosity," Loki hissed. "And the Hulk has already given me a violent death once."

Banner paled and said nothing after that.

He continued with his story, and skimmed the details, but the others undoubtedly noticed how his body shook the closer he got to mentioning each of his deaths.

He then explained to them what they needed to do next.

Thor paced with his arms folded. "So, we go through this Devil's Anus-"

"And I will stay behind and wait for the rebels to arrive so they may help us in our endeavors," Loki said. "Which they will happily do after we free them."

Banner stared at Thor, who shook his head. "That...that would have been my plan. Start the revolution to cause a distraction."

"It was your plan," Loki said. "It worked."

Thor moved closer and peered at Loki in suspicion. "Are you sure you can't just read minds?"

Loki was vaguely flattered by his brother's easy perception of his telepathic prowess, proud that Thor knew not to take Loki at his word, and irritated that Thor had not believed him immediately.

"He can't," Valkyrie said. The others looked at her, and she explained. "I was thinking about what fucking him would be like while we were fighting. He would have reacted."

Loki stared.

She shrugged. "You look at me like we've fucked before. And you don't strike me as a very stoic lover."

Banner and Thor were glancing between them in a combination of confusion, shock, disgust and - he noted - mild interest.

Loki couldn't help the small grin, but all he said was, "We risk losing if we wait too long."

The three of them turned away and began to together discuss the likelihood of his trustworthiness. Loki's grin widened at the spectacle, already knowing what side their decision would fall. He hadn't even technically threatened Banner this time around, though if that reason was more due to his mind irrationally gibbering in pure fear the instant he laid eyes on the man within the beast that had so violently killed him, well...that was fine.

Later, in the elevator together, Loki described to Thor about how in a previous timeline he'd given Loki quite an inspiring speech about how Loki needed to change and grow after Loki had betrayed him yet again. Thor listened quietly before asking, "And have you, brother? Changed?"

 _If becoming progressively more mad can be considered change, then yes._ "I suppose we'll find out."

"So what happens after we escape Sakaar?" Thor asked. "Obviously you die at some point, though apparently in somehow an even less permanent fashion than before."

Loki hummed. "That would be telling."

"This timeline must be quite favorable if it's one you intend to keep," Thor said.

_A gauntleted hand around his neck._

Loki did not answer.

After a moment of silence, Thor brightened. "Hey, let's do Get Help."

Loki had never been so happy to hear those words in his life.

\---------

Loki stayed behind while Thor piloted the leisure vessel away. He could hear the chaos descending on the tower, guns firing and people shouting. The smell of burning - _a gauntleted hand_ \- filled the air. He'd made himself comfortable on the floor, sitting cross legged and meditating to conserve his strength. His fingers tapped out the rhythm to a song to help keep his mind occupied from the less desirable thoughts, from the screams that still encompassed his world.

"Hey mate. I'm Korg. We're about to get on that ginormous ship and get the heck out of here. Wanna come?"

Loki moved to his feet, feeling closer to something more like himself for the first time in what felt like years. "Well, you do look like you are in desperate need of leadership."

\---------

The Statesman was large enough that it would move slowly comparably to the smaller vessel that the others would take, but he had warned Korg nonetheless to take care when steering the ship into the portal.

Loki immediately sought out and claimed his quarters on the ship after explaining their route towards Asgard. They were in fact the same rooms that Thor would take after his modest coronation. Perhaps he could even convince his brother to seek lesser lodgings this time around, since Loki had been here first.

He collapsed onto the bed with a sigh, intending on a few moments of sleep to regain his strength before the fight with Hela's berserker undead. And what an existence he lived that this would be considered the most relaxing part of his day.

He'd nearly drifted off when a rustling noise jarred him awake. The scent of spices was heavy on the air.

"No, no, honey, this is all wrong."

Loki's eyes shot open and he instantly held a knife before himself in reflex. The Grandmaster stood in his room, frowning as he looked around.

The man ignored the knife completely. "You know, I probably didn't catch on at first, so my apologies. Sometimes I just don't know my own strength."

Loki panted through bared teeth.  
"What-"

The Grandmaster twirled a finger in a circle. "This uh, time loop thing. Little experiment I was trying to run, back in the day. I've had a lot of favorites over the centuries, but they're all so...fragile. Fleeting." He approached Loki's bed. "Oh, wow, it looks like it got you bad. But then, there's never quite been anyone like you. To be honest, I hadn't even realized it had worked."

Loki snarled and pushed out with his magic, sending the Grandmaster back a step with the force. But the man was clearly unhurt, and Loki nearly hyperventilated as he was shot a disappointed look. When the Grandmaster stepped forward, Loki jolted up from the bed and backed into a wall.

The Grandmaster paused with a grimace. "Now, now, I'm not mad at you, just let me explain. You'll get it, you're a smart cookie. See I, at some point in my lives, ended up on Earth. Lovely people, the Terrans. They had this method of entertainment they called video games. You could live millions of lives, all different scenarios, and if you didn't win, well, you just restarted in the past and got to try again. That's what I've done for you, I gave you that save point." He paused. "The thing is, Lokester, you're meant to try _new_ things that don't lead to you dying. What's the point of reliving something if you're just going to the same old and be boring? You're the God of Mischief, after all. I'm still not caught up on all the details from my brain reset from your most recent death, mind you, but even with that I can really tell that there's some, some truly beautiful entertainment and variety to be had in the memories you've made before this one. Just great stuff."

 _Entertainment._ The Grandmaster had made both Loki's lives and deaths all living hells and he called it _entertainment._ And it was all happening because, what, the Grandmaster had a _whim?_

The scope of the man's power was staggering. Loki dropped his knife, though all he really wanted to do was jam it into his temple.

"Now he gets it. I'm amazing, right?" The Grandmaster moved forward and wrapped his arm about Loki's shoulders with casual ease, ignoring Loki's shudder. With his other hand he placed an obedience disc against Loki's neck. Loki sucked in a sobbing breath and shut his eyes tightly.

The Grandmaster went on talking. "If you make me happy enough and even manage to live through it, the timeline will stagnate again. Normally I've just gotten bored and let the previous favorites pass naturally, but you - I think you could be around for a good long while. Of course, I made sure I won't remember you at the start, not for the first few weeks - I might have an idea, a sense of everything that's gone before - but that, the randomness of it, that's all part of the fun. And you get to circle around me well beyond your uh, your species' actual lifespan. Try all the avenues, see what could have been if you took the alternate route. You get to...you get to charm _me_ as many times and ways as you could imagine. Aren't you lucky?"

Loki did not respond. He felt like he would shake apart. He stared longingly at the glinting metal of the knife he'd dropped.

"Now let's see here, I guess it's my move, right? I'm not going to cheat by killing you and restarting, and I think it'll be good for you to keep a little extra reminder of our talk. We won't do the public execution route, or killing Scrapper 142. Gosh, I'm sure glad that one wasn't permanent. Remember, we want _different._ "

"Different," Loki echoed, voice dull. He should have cut his own throat when he'd had the chance.

The Grandmaster sighed and squeezed Loki's shoulder in a tight hug, then pulled an obedience disc controller from his robes. "It's going to be especially hard on me. I'll need to take a break from you for a while. But you know what they say - absence makes the heart grow fonder. Do they say that? I'm, I'm fairly sure someone says that. And hey, I've been wanting a vacation anyway. See how the rest of the universe is doing."

Loki was shocked into submission and then bundled into an escape pod, which was shot back down to the planet. The Grandmaster pulled him out just as the Statesman disappeared through a wormhole in the sky.

\-----------

If Loki had thought his life had been hell before, it seemed the Grandmaster had found exactly how to one up himself. He sold Loki in exchange for his freedom, as if he hadn't just been on a ship that would leave Sakaar.

He was punished for his association with the Grandmaster. Every month the newly freed citizens of Sakaar celebrated the success of the revolution with a night of revelry and entertainment. Thousands gathered at the arena. Now no longer able to sate their bloodlust through the death of slaves forced into combat, they turned their violence on Loki. He did not know what the Grandmaster had told them to convince them that Loki's participation in his reign was anything so influential. 

Whatever he'd said, Loki was tortured within an inch of his life, then allowed the following weeks to heal, then tortured again. There was a new tormenter every month, and there seemed to be some sort of competition happening, of wagers and bets among the audience. Sometimes his guards spoke around him as they checked the security of the obedience disc and magic suppressing cuffs, and he was given hints for what pain would come in his future. They were not interested in his bargaining, his threats, or his begging.

In the beginning he had thought of Thor, had wondered if his brother thought that Loki had escaped to save his own hide. Then he wondered if Thor had even survived to think such thoughts. He could have very well been killed in either the face off with Hela or Thanos, or by some other threat out among the stars. 

It did not matter, Loki told himself. This was not the permanent timeline. He only needed to die again, and it would restart.

He found his chance soon after an evening in which the flesh had been slowly flayed from his back piece by piece. As he grew faint from pain, there was suddenly a jump in time and he found himself freed of his bonds and on the ground of the arena. The air vibrated with the cheers of thousands in the stands. 

The night’s punishment must have been coming to an end. Loki's back screamed with far too much pain for that to be a relief.

His torturer was prowling the arena perimeter and soaking in the audience's praise, his bloodstained hands raised into the air.

Loki could see more blood as it steadily dripped from the end of the blade that rested on the table he'd previously been bound upon. Carefully, he experimentally made a fist. Every muscle connected to the movement and exposed to air blasted with fresh pain. He sucked in a shuddering breath, his howl choked in his throat. The crowd cheered on.

 _Move, you weak fool,_ he thought. This was nothing. The Children of Thanos had done far worse in their leisure time after he’d been plucked from the Void. The Hulk had done worse in a mere few seconds of murderous rage.

He pushed himself up with a scream and threw himself upon the knife. It sliced open his palm as he grasped it, then brought it towards his throat.

The obedience disc was triggered. His body seized and slid to the floor, the flaying knife still in his hand, now plunged deep enough to grate against bone as he convulsed. Dirt and rock dug into exposed muscle.

The cheers of the audience had died down in shock. His torturer, flush with humiliation, approached him on the ground. The disc was powered off and the knife kicked from his grip.

Loki panted, his eyes sliding shut. Despair made his throat tight. Frustrated rage lashed within him without an outlet, his magic trapped. Most of all, he felt the fear of his failure, the desperation he’d built up for months. All for nothing. He’d been too slow. He’d wasted his chance. _Weak. Useless._

_Norns, no. Please let me die._

The crowd was booing.

His torturer reached down and clamped a hand on his neck, lifting him from the ground. Loki struggled as the blood pounded in his ears, his frantic grip on the forearm slick with blood. He stared into the eyes of his tormenter and saw Thanos.

He was slammed onto the table on his back. Agony ripped through him like a sword and he arched, tried to keep his screaming nerves from further contact with the rough surface. His head spun, the vision of Thanos fading from existence.

“You’ve disgraced me,” his torturer whispered into his ear. “I should carve your fucking eyes from your skull.”

He didn’t. Permanent damage was not allowed. Even flaying would soon become an unusable torment, as brands were applied to Loki after each torture to keep a tally. His captors would not want the canvas for their records to be destroyed.

What the torturer did do, was pour acidic poison into Loki’s eyes. The world went red, then black.

The renewed cheers from the crowd drowned out his screams.

\-----------

Loki’s desperation increased as the months went by, as they stretched into a year and beyond with no end in sight. His attempts to release himself through death were repeatedly thwarted. He was kept imprisoned, in chains, and constantly monitored to ensure his survival. Ever since his first attempt at suicide, his eyes were regularly doused in the same acidic poison, to blind him and reduce his chances of escape.

The Grandmaster did not come to him again, not until Loki could barely think through the torment his life had become. He spoke to himself in the dark when he was alone, his mind flitting through new scenarios that would please the Grandmaster. New possibilities. There had to be something that would satisfy the Grandmaster enough to end it. He had nothing but time.

He wept at the thought.

The door to his prison opened with a hiss. He flinched and pressed his cheek into the wall, breath ragged and teeth clenched. It could not have been more than a week since his last visit to the arena, which meant that his captors had come to force feed him or bathe him. Neither were pleasant prospects, especially since the guards most recently assigned charge of his bathing had taken to holding him beneath the water while he thrashed, his traitorous body instinctively and desperately clinging to life. 

"Oh, Lo, honey, you poor thing."

The Grandmaster. 

Loki froze, not daring to even breathe as his heart fluttered in his chest. He blinked agonized eyes and turned his head in the direction of the voice. He wondered if the Grandmaster was truly present, or if Loki was suffering from auditory hallucinations.

The voice came again, soft and fond. "Come here, sweetie, let me take a closer look at you."

Loki's arms and torso were bound but his legs were free. Hesitantly, he pulled away from the wall. He moved slowly through the pain in uncertainty, unaware of just how close the Grandmaster was positioned. He was also terrified that if he moved any further he would find only an empty room and his mad thoughts for company.

But the voice came again. "There you go. I'm here. Yikes, look at your poor face."

A spear of shame accompanied the fear. He knew he was marked with scars and wounds, and his bonds prevented him accessing his magic to hide them beneath a glamor. Would the Grandmaster not want him, now that he was so hideous?

He felt moisture course down his face as he inched forward on his knees, afraid to hope. Hands descended on his shoulders to steady him and he gasped out a sob as the familiar scent of spices filled his nostrils.

"Hey, don't look so glum, dry those tears." Hands on his face, in his hair, and at the first kind touch in what felt like years he broke further. "Wow, this uh, this really got to you, didn't it? I mean I figured it would, what are games without some harrowing experiences, some failure to sweeten the success. Shame about your eyes though, those were really a perk of your appearance."

Loki tried to speak but his language was too stuttered by emotion to be intelligible. All of his plans, his practice for this very scenario, faded from his grasp like sand as he strained to remember. "Grandmaster," he finally managed. "I can make it different."

The Grandmaster's hands clapped in delight on Loki's shoulders. "I know you will! That's what I like about you, a good set of wheels turning in that head. Though probably right now they need a bit of an oiling."

Was that a note of disappointment in the Grandmaster's voice? Loki shivered and wondered if he should apologize for his condition. "I'll do what you want. I'll make it different. Please."

"Please? Please what? Oh, no, you think I'm here to take you out of this place, don't you?"

Loki stilled. The hands in his hair continued to stroke.

The Grandmaster spoke with a tone of admonishment, as if Loki were a child. "Darling, did you forget about the time difference on Sakaar? I've barely had time to head out, haven't even started my proper vacation yet. I just came back because well, I found that on second thought I couldn't quite stand to be away from you for that long. So I brought some gifts to appease the people of Sakaar and in return they gave me a very nice video compilation of your punishments. Should tide me over as I really start exploring the outer reaches. Just until we get into another timeline with a more hands on approach."

Loki reeled at the possibility that he could be stuck in this timeline indefinitely, possibly for thousands of years before it was reset. He would not die of old age on Sakaar. "No," he said, desperate, his mind racing - the words, the _words_ , dissolving in his panic. "No, please, I can - I can-"

A finger against his lips. "Ssshhhh, sweetheart. Don't get selfish. Now I've done a lot for you, setting up this loop. This is just how things are going to be for a while. No sense in getting excited and rushing through now that you know the game. Let it marinate a little."

"Please," he tried, and when the Grandmaster's hands slipped from him in annoyance he bowed his head to the floor. "Please, I assure you I am not that interesting. It...it would be better for you to kill me, truly kill me, before I bore you. Please, Grandmaster."

Loki felt the silence that followed like a weight on his back. He heard the shift of robes as the Grandmaster moved to his feet. "Well, would you look at that. I'm - I have to say I _am_ feeling a little bored. This kind of negative attitude is just, it's so draining. I'll come back and check on you and then we can re-evaluate. Trust me, Loki, this really is for your own good."

The door hissed open.

Loki felt his heart lurch. "Wait!"

The door hissed shut. The scent of spices began to fade.

Loki panted in shock in the aftermath, every hurt in his body amplified as despair began to creep in, slowly at first, then it culminated into a raging landslide.

He screamed his anguish until his throat bled, until his captors came and shocked him into submission and clamped a muzzle over his face to quiet him.

The scream in his mind was neverending.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Extra warning for non-graphic rape in this chapter.

When Thanos had performed the Snap, the universe descended into chaos. 

For years Valkyrie traveled with Korg and Miek as they tried to navigate the ruin of the galaxies. They never lingered, always just taking what they needed to survive. For all Thanos's talk of balance and plenty, the intense political strife that followed the hacking of half of each culture's population made several planets nigh uninhabitable, especially for outsiders. 

There was talk of one place that had been completely unaffected by the Snap. She'd long since given up on fairytales (being a thousands-year old drunk would do that to you), but Korg spoke nonstop about the place like it was a fucking utopia, and so they went searching for clues. Well, Korg and Miek did. She just searched for more alcohol.

Each planet yielded a new direction, and on the last one the clue Korg found had her cursing loudly into her beer.

Korg spoke excitedly. "He said it's a planet with many doors."

She groaned. "A planet with many doors? Isolated from the rest of the universe and nearly impossible to get to?"

Korg stared at her with a big dumb smile. "Yes."

"It's Sakaar."

"Oh." Korg frowned and seemed to think on it. "It sounds like it's a great place, now."

"It won't be," Valkyrie said.

But something was ticking in her mind, a sort of strange longing. Like something she'd forgotten, just out of reach. That night, when Korg and Miek were asleep, she sighed and altered their course back to the floating hunks of rock and rubble that used to be Asgard.

She was going to regret this.

\-----------

Sakaar seemed to have changed on the surface, but Valkyrie refused to be fooled. It was her pet theory that the reason it remained unaffected by the Snap was that there was such a high turnover of the life that arrived that even wiping out half the planet would have not made much of a change. New occupiers would have just immediately filtered in to fill out the empty space, and it would have remained exactly as chaotic as before.

The Grandmaster had fallen from power, but his influence was still clear in the way people acted and celebrated with hedonism in the streets. He'd apparently mollified his opponents by sacrificing something very dear to him and going into exile instead of the death he more than deserved.

What did the Grandmaster have to sacrifice that he loved?

It was when they saw what had become of the tower at the city center that Valkyrie wanted to leave immediately. Instead of the previous winners of the Contest of Champions, there were new sculptures in place. Miek. Korg. Thor. And there on the left, her own face made of metal.

They were the Legendary Heroes of Sakaar. The ones who helped the revolution to free the slaves.

She stared at Thor's face with a sick feeling in her stomach and a powerful urge to drown herself in a bottle.

Korg was unaware of her mood and extremely pleased with the state of the world, wanting to explore immediately to see what new laws had been instituted, to see what customs had developed out of the new order. 

Valkyrie just wanted to drink.

She kept well away from the tower and instead checked on one of her favored bars in the city, which was still in business. For weeks she frequented the place while Korg and Miek made friends and moved about and enjoyed themselves and the high status they held among the people.

She was in the bar when she heard the announcement. In two days' time, the citizens would gather at the old fighting arena to view the public punishment of the Grandmaster's Favored, to remind themselves of what they came from. It was a once a month occurrence.

"See? Not so different after all," she muttered to herself, wondering at what poor bastard the Grandmaster had managed to fob off for a scapegoat. The people still wanted their violence, even if now there was a lot less of it.

But now there was a nagging in the back of her mind, as if a memory was attempting to push through. She stubbornly ignored it, burying the feeling under bottles of alcohol. 

She didn't go to the event in person, but she made sure to stay at the bar during the allotted time. It was nearly completely empty except for her and a few of the workers, and a large projection in the back showed the spectacle at the arena. She was watching when they brought out the Grandmaster's Favored. 

It was Loki.

Fuck, she'd thought the bastard had run off to save his own neck after sending them to Asgard.

After Thanos, after the Tesseract and Thor's death, she'd been glad of it. If anyone was going to survive the Snap, it would be him. Even if she had hated that he hadn't been around to deal with that mess. Thor would have lived if his brother had been there to protect him. If it hadn't been for her.

She watched the feed. 

Loki's eyes were glazed, his face slack ( _drugged,_ she thought) as he was paraded naked around the arena. An obedience disc glittered on his neck, the flesh around it red and scarred.

Eventually, he was brought to a device set in the center and bound on his stomach. Several humanoid species gathered around the frame, and as Valkyrie realized what was about to happen the horror jolted her to chug the rest of her bottle and immediately demand another.

The bartender absent-mindedly followed her request, his attention still half on the screen. He rolled his eyes with a sigh and addressed a worker who was sweeping the floor. "They ran out of ideas for this month."

"Fucking him is a classic," the worker argued.

"It's boring is what it is."

"They have to give him more time to recover after the snake venom from the last session. I heard it nearly did him in."

She stubbornly kept her eyes down and tried not to listen to the commentary, to the obvious enjoyment despite the complaints. Each time she glanced up a new creature was tormenting Thor's brother, using his body. She could see Loki grimace and flinch, could see his body go tight with agony.

She couldn't watch it any longer. She took a bottle to go and stepped out for some fresh air, but Loki's image was plastered on nearly every screen on the street. And there were many.

When they were done, a fucking _brand_ was applied to Loki's back, adding another scar to wrecked flesh. She had to consciously loosen her hand from her bottle before she shattered the glass.

"What's with the brand?" she asked, careful to keep her voice steady. She'd returned to the bar as the lesser of two evils.

"When all of his skin has been marked, he gets to go free."

She chugged the last of her drink. _Fuck that._

She stumbled the rest of the way back to their shared apartment.

That night, Korg and Miek returned, Miek making soothing sounds as Korg moved about to ready himself for bed. She came out of her room to a devastated face of rocks.

"If I could cry I would," Korg said. "I lack the tear ducts, you see." He rubbed at a piece of rock on his face and watched it crumble off.

Now that she was beginning to sober up, rage burned in her gut. Despite her words, she took no pleasure in being right, in Korg's idealism being shattered. "We'll get him out."

  
\-----------

She simply asked. It was that easy.

As one of the legendary Heroes of Sakaar, she had leave to do anything she wanted, including see the planet's one remaining slave.

She was given every passcode she would need, and informed that he had been fed, watered, and cleansed. She could take all the time she wished.

Loki's cell was an old fighter's quarters, with a bathroom and a full bed. It smelled heavily of disinfectant cleaner, and beneath that, the stale scents of piss and blood that hadn't quite dissipated. She didn't see him, but she could hear him muttering quietly. Cautiously, she followed the noise until she found him, thin and ragged as a starved dog, wedged tightly against the bed and wall. He was bound like a beast in a harness of chains, his arms folded in front of him and restrained wrist to elbow with padded magnetic cuffs. Hunched forward, his words were too low for her to make out. She could see the way he sat, his long legs folded close to his body, was an awkward war between what felt the most secure and what caused the least pain in his new injuries. 

She moved slowly, not wanting to startle him, but as soon as she neared him, he fell silent and his hands clenched.

"Loki," she said.

He lunged for her. 

She dodged away as his teeth clacked together near her arm. "Fuck!" She grabbed him by the hair to keep him out of biting range. He kicked at her ineffectively, teeth bared in a snarl. She could see healing scars above and below his lips, the jagged edges of wounded tissue around his eyes. She saw that it hadn't been drugs that had given his eyes their glazed quality during the punishment, but the fact that their color had gone milky pale.

He was blind, she realized with horror.

He managed a harsh kick to her thigh and she cursed, then yanked his hair down to force him onto his back. She straddled his torso, pinning him down, and kept her vicious grip steady until he finally stopped fighting. His body shivered between her legs, a pained grimace on his face.

An image flashed in her mind, of her above Loki, their lips pressed together as she rode his cock. She was so startled by the clarity of it that she released him and quickly backed off. _Where the fuck did that come from?_

He didn't attack her again. Instead, he awkwardly pushed himself back to his corner and curled up with a soft sound. His teeth rattled audibly as he shook, face pressed into the angle where the wall met the floor.

She crouched, ready in case he became violent again. "Loki, it's Valkyrie. Or Scrapper 142. Remember? I'm not here to hurt you. Well, more."

 _Your brother is dead,_ she didn't say.

"Hey. Do you remember me?" she asked. "You wanted me to beat the shit out of you back in the day." Could he even understand words? His sanity had seemed tenuous enough when they'd been allies.

"He killed you."

His voice was so barely audible and muffled against the wall that she thought she'd misheard. But then another flash of memory stopped her cold as she felt the phantom stab of a knife in her breast. She saw the Grandmaster's eyes glittering above her, a hand on the dagger's hilt as the life drained from her body.

"What the hell is happening," she hissed. "Is this that...that time thing you were blabbering about, when we escaped."

But he didn't seem to be listening any longer. "It has to be different. It has to be different. It has to be different."

She reached for him and tried to turn him over, to grasp his chin, intending to get his attention. He bit her fingers - _hard_ \- and she cursed and punched him in the face in reflex. He cried out and reeled from the blow, dazed.

"Stop it," she hissed, shaking the blood from her hand. "I'm trying to help you."

But he didn't respond.

Fuck, she should just leave him. There was obviously no help for him now, and she and Korg and Miek weren't exactly equipped to handle a blind and deranged Asgardian prince. 

But she thought of Thor, and how she'd failed him with the damned Tesseract. She thought of the stirring in her gut that she didn't want to put a name to.

"I'm taking you out of here," she said. "Don't bite me again, or I will knock you out."

He bit her again. She just grit her teeth and readjusted her hold on his chains so she was out of reach.

The guards gave her dubious looks when she brought him out twisting like an angry cat in her grip. "Your people asked if there was anything I wanted when I arrived. I want him."

"The Favored's punishment is not completed yet."

"It is for the next month," she said. "You can take him back when it's time for the next round. But I want him." Like hell she would give him back, but they didn't need to know that.

"For the Legendary Scrapper 142, we'll grant it. Only please allow him to heal. We do not want him dead."

_Right. You seem very concerned with his health._

If she knew the way this system worked, the brands to keep track of his suffering were arbitrary. Sakaar needed its blood, and if they didn't have Loki they would turn on each other.

They had no intention of ever letting him go.

She brought him back to the apartment, ignoring the shocked looks sent her way by the Sakaarians. His struggles had waned and his face grew more attentive as they exited the tower. With a stab she wondered if he had been expecting her to bring him to further punishment.

He grew quiet as she lead him through the city, his head tilting whenever he heard some sound. But his energy faded quickly, and his head was lolling by the time she brought him to her room, his milky eyes mere slits and his breathing labored. 

"There's a bed here," she said, as she helped him sit.

"It has to be different," he muttered. They were the only words she'd heard him speak since they'd left the tower.

She contemplated the chains, before ultimately deciding to remove them. He seemed to have calmed down now that he realized no more pain was incoming. And there was always her alternative plan of knocking him unconscious, though she would really feel like shit if she had to do that to him in his state.

He hissed as the chains loosened and were pulled away, as she demagnetized the cuffs on his arms. Though she watched him carefully for movement, he sat docile and oddly still. She carefully explained her movements as she removed the tattered long sleeved tunic he wore, wanting a better look at his injuries. 

Up close, the scars on his back were horrific. Each a thin line, puckered and raised, starting at his lower back and moving upwards over his shoulders, curving down his chest, up the back of his neck.

There were hundreds of them.

Time moved differently on Sakaar. It had been years for her. How long had it been for Loki?

She reached out to examine the raw skin left by the chains, in the scars unassociated with the brands. His ribs stood out prominently, and fresh bruises mottled his torso and lower back.

She noted with a jerk that he'd stopped breathing completely at her touch, his posture stiff, his blind eyes facing forward. With a lurch of nausea she remembered the rapes of the night before.

She ripped her hand away and slowly moved to her feet. "I have some painkillers," she said, and went to fetch them. She brought him a glass of water. But when she tried to hand him the pills, her hand phased through empty air.

"Shit," she said, immediately getting to her feet and leaving the room, visions of him racing through the streets blind and being recaptured or worse filtering through her mind.

She didn't need to go far. He was still in the apartment. The kitchen, in fact, with a large knife in his hand.

How had he even known that was there?

She removed her own knife from her belt, ready to parry him if he attacked, cursing herself for not asking for an obedience disc controller. "Loki," she said, and his gaze turned to an approximation of her location. 

"It has to be different," he said again, before he plunged the knife into his own neck.

  
\-----------

She woke up with a throbbing head. Definitely shouldn't have mixed drinks so extravagantly then night before, but the pretty girl - Helena? Heidi? - at the party had been so interested in sampling the new items on the bar menu, and she hated to see good alcohol go to waste. Or bad alcohol, for that matter.

She leaned up with a groan, stretching out the kink in her neck. Somehow, she'd fallen asleep on the Warsong, with no recollection of having gotten there.

_Must have been some night._

Well, while she was here, she might as well start work. But first she needed something to ease the hangover. She rummaged through the bottles on the ship's floor until she found one that was only half empty, and guzzled down the rest.

_Much better._

She swept most of the bottles out with a foot into the surrounding trash heap and sat herself down in the pilot's seat. She spotted a group of roaming scavengers when she performed a scan. Normally, she would let them be, but something this time ticked in the back of her brain with a sudden viciousness. The residual hangover must have been making her short tempered.

Well, they were on her turf, anyway.

She moved the Warsong into the air and fired on them as they began to flee. She let a few of them live, satisfied they wouldn't be coming back any time soon.

She continued on, scanning the ground in the direction they had been headed. 

There was something on the ground at the base of a heap. A body.

She landed the Warsong and moved towards it on the ground, her hand clasped on an obedience disc. It looked dead.

As she moved close enough to see the face, something jarred her. She recognized him. She knew his face. She even felt she would know his name if she just thought hard enough, but she didn't know why. 

Maybe it was someone she'd met when she was drunk. Maybe they'd even fucked at one of the Grandmaster's gatherings. He was kind of pretty, in a greasy way.

She crouched down next to him. "Hello?" She grabbed a long piece of scrap metal off the ground and poked his cheek.

He came awake with a snarl.

She threw the obedience disc without thinking and activated it, her heart pounding. She was scared, she realized. Why was she scared? He hadn't done so much as spit. And he looked like he was seconds away from becoming a corpse. She deactivated the obedience disc and he panted weakly on the ground, eyes unfocused. He was completely limp when she picked him up.

She carried him to the Warsong, her mind still signaling her with anxious warnings. She wrapped him in chains for good measure before locking him into her cargo compartment. When he'd recovered enough to howl, she shocked him again, grinding her teeth. She couldn't wait to give this one to the Grandmaster, to get him off her hands, to...to...

_"You can't take me to the Grandmaster."_

She looked down to see if he'd spoken, but he was still caught in the throes of the punishment from the obedience disc.

She felt sick and turned off the charge. He rolled onto his side and heaved up bile, his skin bone white.

She didn't take him to the Grandmaster. She took him to her apartment.

  
\---------

She gagged him before she dragged him from her ship, partially so she could get close without risking him biting her, and partially so he wouldn't draw the attention of her neighbors and everyone in a ten mile radius with his screams. Even muffled, he managed a surprising amount of volume.

But she refused to use the obedience disc on him again. He seemed too weak to deal with its effects.

She entered her apartment and gratefully dumped him on the floor. He sounded like he was dying for the next hour, and she was very tempted to just go over and soundly kick him in the temple to give them both some peace.

She was sitting at the counter in the kitchen, her head in her hands as she wondered why she didn't just toss him into the hallway for someone else to deal with, when he went quiet. Or quieter. He still moaned, but at least he wasn't trying to rip his own throat to pieces anymore.

She pulled over a box and sat in front of where he was hogtied on her floor. He flinched at her movement but immediately resumed staring like he wanted to tear her face off with his teeth. He somehow looked less like he was inches away from death's door.

"Did you happen to take any of the Grandmaster's experimental drugs?" she asked. "I knew a girl once that ran through the trash heaps naked for five days before we caught up with her after one of his parties."

His eyes moved over her, and there was...something. Something more than the pure wild feral quality he'd been displaying as soon as she'd woken him.

She nodded to the gag. "If I take that out, are you going to start screaming again?"

He looked uncertain. Maybe he didn't know himself. She held up the shock controller but did not activate it. When he tensed expectantly, she moved forward and removed her belt, then pulled the the giant ball of sodden cloth from his mouth. He shook the hair out of his face and worked his jaw, his eyes darting about her apartment in a hunted fashion. He did not scream again.

She lowered the obedience disc controller. "See? Much better."

There was a knock at her door. Her captive sucked in a breath and stared at the door with wide eyes. He squirmed against the chains. "Hide, hide, hide," he chanted.

The knock came again. He whimpered then bared his teeth, as if he couldn't decide between terror and rage.

"Just give me a second," she said. "I'll get rid of whoever's at the door."

"They'll take me," he gasped, eyes wild.

She was about to brush off his protests when she felt a familiar ping at the back of her head again. She frowned and turned to him more fully. The knock came again, but she ignored it. 

She stepped over to him and unlatched his hands from his ankles then hauled him over her shoulder. He was a tall bastard, and grunted at the discomfort as she adjusted him more securely. "Stay quiet," she said, carrying him to her closet. She dumped him into the refuse that littered the floor after double checking there were no broken glass bottles he would be damaged upon. Then she shut the door to hide him inside.

The knock came again.

What the hell was going on?

She opened the door to see Topaz on the other side. The Captain of the Guards peered past her into her apartment and stretched her lips into a sneer. "Love what you've done with the place."

Valkyrie just smiled and raised her eyebrows. "Did you want something, or...?" She winked suggestively.

Topaz lost what little good humor she had. "The Grandmaster wanted to deliver personal thanks for your work."

So personal that he sent his lackey to say it. Sometimes the Grandmaster tried far too hard to get them to like each other. If he had meant for any physical gifts or money to accompany the words, she was sure Topaz would have "misplaced" them on her way over.

"You can let him know he's very welcome. Was that all?"

Topaz narrowed her eyes and gave the apartment one last once over. "We received alerts of screaming coming from this apartment block."

Valkyrie rounded her eyes innocently. "Oh. Would you like me to give you a graphic description of exactly what was happening?"

Topaz's expression spasmed in disgust. She immediately turned to leave with her contingent of guards without another word.

Valkyrie watched them leave down the hall and then shut her door and locked it. 

Back in her closet, her new friend looked like he was in the middle of a panic attack. She checked to make sure he hadn't pissed himself before she dragged him out.

"They've gone," she said. "Hey! Do you hear me? You're safe."

His eyes focused on her, his mouth open as he sucked in gulp after gulp of air. 

Norns, she was shit at comforting people. "There we go. Have you got a name?"

Unbelievably, he began to laugh, his forehead rolling against the floor. He didn't answer her.

She ran a hand over her face and wondered why she bothered. "Did you do something to the Grandmaster? If you've committed a crime against him I won't be able to protect you forever."

Her heart seized as she said the words, as a terrible feeling of sadness and guilt had bile surge into the back of her throat. She swallowed with effort.

He'd begun to mutter under his breath, his attention far away. 

She sighed. "Well, I'm out of drinks, and food, and the credits you were going to provide me with are sadly absent, so..."

"Under the bed," he suddenly said.

"What?"

More muttering.

Frowning, she moved to her bedroom and found two large, unopened cans of beer. She brought them out to her guest. "How did you know about these? Have I invited you here before?"

"It has to be different," he said.

"What is happening," she asked, growing angry. "Tell me now."

A shudder ran through his frame. He curled up as much as the chains would allow. "It's complicated. But I think...I can give you a taste."

She stared at him for a long moment, warring with herself. She still had a strong urge to throw him out so he would no longer be her problem. She wasn't equipped to babysit someone who was probably going to die in one way or another. 

She reached for his chains. Alarm bells were going off in her head, but they weren't for worry of her own safety. She unlocked the chains until only one wrist was bound, and she kept the chain connected to it in her fist. She was tense as she watched him slowly push himself up into a sitting position, blinking rapidly and swaying as he moved. His fingers went to the obedience disc at his neck and froze when she held up the controller.

"Don't," she warned, finger poised over the trigger.

A spark of anger in his gaze, but he lowered his hand until both settled in his lap. 

She opened and handed him one of the cans she'd found under her bed. He wrinkled his nose at it but took a long drink nonetheless.

"Talk," she ordered. 

He looked up at her, a strange light in his eyes. "I never said talk."

"What?"

He lunged and his hand was on her forehead and she was falling, tumbling through memory after memory. She was on top of the stranger, fucking him on a leisure vessel while he stared up at her with naked need and hands chained above his head. She saw herself die, the Grandmaster making disappointed cooing noises while Topaz looked on in glee.

She saw him explaining the time loop he had become caught in, and she saw him mad and tortured, escaping life as soon as he had the chance. She saw him die with a knife in his chest, once, twice, again and again. She saw him fall from the sky, see her, then immediately kill himself with a piece of sharp rubble. She saw herself gain a sense of what was happening, and begin to stop him, only to lose him again in one way or another each time.

Lives upon lives that she'd felt buried in the back of her mind, mere flashes of them brought to the forefront.

She tore herself away, reeling as the new thoughts settled. He watched her with a wary expression, crouched on the ground. 

"So I have fucked you," was all she said.

His eyes had locked onto her like a stag watched an approaching predator, every line in his body ready to fight or flee. "A very long time ago."

"Why can I remember if no one else does?"

"I don't know." Loki - that was his name, his name was Loki - slumped. "I'm fairly certain I've never tried this before," he murmured, staring at the hand that had touched her.

Her heart was slowly returning to a normal rhythm, but now it was as if the entire world had been upside down all along and she had just finally had it righted. "How do we fix it?"

As much as she wanted to waste herself away on Sakaar, the idea was moot if they were trapped in some sort of existential time loop. 

How many years had she lived and not been aware of them?

"I die," Loki answered. His eyes had gone far away, and there was a near constant thrum to his frame.

She remembered one of many memories of him killing himself as soon as he'd woken on the trash heaps. He'd been so devoid of hope. Her instinctive horror had only lasted until he'd died, and then she supposed everything had restarted again.

"That's not fixing it," she said, moving to her feet decisively. She jerked at the chain connected to his wrist. "Come on. Up."

He gave her a suspicious look. "Why?"

"Get. Up."

He flashed his teeth at her commanding tone, and his free hand moved to his side.

"Summon a knife and I activate this," she said, hand on the obedience disc controller. Her heart had begun to pound in fear again, and this time she knew why. She was furious with him for being this much of an idiot.

He relaxed his hand and reluctantly raised it in surrender. She pulled him up and backed him into her bedroom, her eyes on his. She pushed him down when the backs of his knees hit the bed, and then gave a wrench to pull his body closer to the headboard. She ignored his grimace at the rough handling and looped the chain through the headboard, grabbing his free hand and binding it firmly in place. 

"What are you doing?" he hissed, squirming.

"Should have thought that was fairly obvious," she said.

When she went for his legs he tried to defend himself with thrashing kicks, but she made her living by successfully capturing and imprisoning potential fighters. Already snared and still weakened from his resurrection, he was no match as she looped the center of more chain about his thighs, binding them together. She ignored his squirming and his cursing as she tethered the ends to the framework beneath the bed, then grabbed more chains to wrap about his body and additionally pin him down at chest and belly and knees.

_Topaz or the Grandmaster will take him if they know he's here, that is if he doesn't find a way to gut himself first. If you give him an inch, you'll lose him again._

She bound his ankles together last, pulling down on the chain tether until he came up sharply against the bonds on his wrists with a gasp. Then she locked it in place beneath the footboard.

He was hissing threats and profanities that she tuned out as she gathered the last of what she would need. She pinched his nose with her fingers to inspire him to open his mouth and ignored his quickly muted shout of protest and subsequent gnashing teeth as she crammed a wadded ball of cloth over his tongue. She bound several strips of fabric both in and over his mouth to keep it in place. She caught more than a few of his hairs in the knots in her haste to silence him.

When she was done, his muscles quivered with strain and he could barely move, but he still made the attempt, his fingers feeling along his bonds in desperation. He made urgent noises that were satisfyingly greatly muted, and she didn't know why she had suffered through his screaming before.

Her heart had finally started to slow now that he was thoroughly restrained, the single minded intensity that had clouded her mind beginning to fade.

"Here's what is going to happen now," she said, as she caught her breath. "I am going to keep you here until your brother arrives. And then we will all together try to figure out how to beat this."

The panic had returned to his eyes full force. He shook his head and tried to strain against his many chains, but he would get nowhere. Most beds of any quality on Sakaar were made to withstand violent couplings from a variety of strong species, and he was bound too tightly to get much leverage even if that had not been the case.

She spoke steadily over the panicked noises he made. "Now, I need food and drink, and I need credits for that. This apartment is well fortified. You'll be perfectly safe as long as you don't draw the attention of the Grandmaster's right hand bitch." She grabbed his chin to put his full focus on her, and he stilled. Tears of frustration glittered in his eyes. "I'm not watching you kill yourself again. Do you hear me? You've had years of trying. Now it's my turn."


	7. Chapter 7

He was still there when she returned, if the moment of dead silence in her apartment followed by the sounds of frantic struggle were any indication. Still alive, though that should have been obvious since the last day had not restarted. The chains he'd been bound in had a mystical edge to ensure their captives stayed put - she liked to cover all bases when she went hunting for new sport for the Grandmaster.

His wild eyes darted immediately to her when she entered the bedroom, and then his face softened with supreme relief, his head falling back against the pillow as he stilled his fighting and took harsh breaths through his nostrils. 

Right. She supposed he had to have been worried that Topaz and her guards had come back for another look-through. He was underestimating just how much the woman wanted nothing to do with Valkyrie.

When she circled the bed, however, he resumed his rage-filled stare of the day before. The hate in his eyes could have peeled the paint from the walls.

She removed the layers of his effective gag and brought water to his lips. "Drink," she ordered.

He obeyed, struggling from the awkward position, and her gaze became caught on his long throat as it worked to swallow. 

He drew away when he was done and stared accusingly. "Where were you?"

"Working," she answered. She hadn't found any people to sell, but had acquired a few valuable items that she was able to sell in town. It was enough for now.

Soon, she would begin to gather supplies for what was to come.

She freed his restraints from the bed but latched his hands together in front of him and kept a grip on a chain leading to his hands. He was very stiff rising from the bed, pained but trying to hide it, and she thought with a small pang that maybe next time she wouldn't pull him as tight. Luckily, Asgardians were sturdy enough that she knew she wouldn't need to worry about his hands falling off.

He balked when she followed him into the bathroom, but she stood firm with hands on her hips when he glared.

"In case you didn't hear me, I'll explain it one more time. I'm not letting you kill yourself. So I'm not leaving you in here alone to break a mirror or find some other means of ending your life. Now, go in the toilet or I'll just let you soil yourself in the bed later."

She saw his jaw clench and resignation enter his eyes and would have felt like shit if she didn't have dozens of visions of his death in technicolor decorating her mind. She never saw it coming in the previous timelines, but she hadn't quite known the game in any of them. Now he'd fully let her in, and like hell was she going to let him push her out again. He could hate her afterwards all he wanted, but at least he would be alive.

The irony in the fact that she was now technically again loyal to the royal family of Asgard was not lost on her.

He used the toilet with cheeks burning red and then she marched him into the kitchen with a hand gripping his arm. He suddenly reared back in her hold, his legs folding beneath him, and she held him tightly as her confusion and fear rose.

"What are you doing?" she demanded, tightening her hold until he grimaced. He fought to press against the counter, to keep his head down.

"The window," he gasped. "I'll be seen."

She looked up at the long windows that bordered her apartment, the view of the city and ships commuting in the distance. "I can darken the windows," she said. "But the button is on the wall next to them."

He stared at her, refusing to budge. 

She sighed and grabbed the controller for the obedience disc. "Sorry."

She depressed the button, then left him shuddering on the ground as she went to make the windows opaque. Immediately the apartment felt more claustrophobic. She felt the discomfort transform into irritation, and grabbed a drink on her way back to Loki. She took a swig as she powered off the disc. He panted against the floor, his eyes dark with rage and his hands trembling violently in the aftermath.

She ignored the look and hefted him up, then sat him at the counter, holding him until she was sure he was steady. She gestured at the plate of food that rested before him. "That's yours. Eat."

He tilted his head forward with his hair partially covering his face and made no move for the food. She sat on a chair beside him, the chain connected to his hands once again firmly in her grasp.

"Why," he asked.

She drank from the bottle, desperate to ease her stress. "Why what?"

He spoke slowly, as if she was dim - which he probably thought she was. "Why go through the trouble to contain me."

"It's no trouble at all when you're in such a shit state," she said in a flippant tone. 

"I'll only die again eventually," he argued. Or promised.

Her heart began to pound. Immediately, she wanted to restrain him back on the bed with chains in even more ridiculous excess. Outwardly, she kept her expression bored. "Then next time around maybe I'll remember even more. Now eat before I shove that food down your throat."

Eyes sparking defiance, he ate. Not much, and not well with his wrists bound so closely, but enough that she was satisfied he would keep his strength up. She finished what he did not, ignoring his open look of contemptuous disgust as she took large bites.

When she was done, she pushed the empty plate aside. "So, the Grandmaster," she said, and Loki flinched so violently he almost fell from his seat. He immediately braced his forearms against the countertop to steady himself, his forehead pressed into the smooth tile. The tremble in his hands, in his entire frame, had returned with a vengeance. 

She gave him a moment, her inkling growing. "He's the cause of it all, isn't he?"

A deep, shuddering breath, and he raised his head again, his jaw clenched. "How astute of you."

The why didn't matter. She'd spent years upon years knowing the Grandmaster, living under his employ, feeding his compulsions for games. His desires were fleeting. There was always a different bauble, another party, a new drug. A new body.

Somehow, Loki had enamored him enough to warrant the manipulation of time itself.

She didn't envy Loki. And she hated that now she had dozens of very clear sense memories of what it was like to watch him die, both knowing him and not.

She ruthlessly pushed down the feelings of horror that twisted in her gut and made her want to yell and weep and smash every breakable item she owned. After she secured him again, she would drink herself senseless, but not before. She met Loki's eyes, which had gone hard like steel at her silence, his composure regained even as his hands continuously shook.

"What," he finally snarled.

She shrugged, deciding not to pursue the subject while he - while _both of them_ were so mentally fragile. "Nothing. Just thinking. You'd be the last person I'd expect to be _too_ good at making friends."

The rage in his eyes sharpened, and he looked away at the opaque windows. The trembling in his hands increased and his lips tightened in irritation, his fingers lacing together in an effort to be still.

"I can get you something for that," she offered. When he turned back to her, she nodded at his hands.

"No," he hissed. "I would rather my mind be clear when you fail."

She only just resisted the urge to yank him by the chain, her hand tightening on the links until it pained her. Every fiber of her body howled in conviction that this time she would _not_ lose this fight.

\-----------

The next days were exactly what she thought the experience of a Valkyrie singlehandedly caring for an unwilling and resentful young, spoiled prince would be like. Loki made no effort to hide his seething anger. The walls he'd built about himself, however unsteady, fueled his drive for hate. She only saw them drop once or twice, when he thought she wasn't looking, saw the tears he allowed to quietly course down his face.

She drank slightly less, to keep the undercurrent of fear more alive, to keep her alert to his behaviors. He would not plan anything without her noticing. He had not given her every memory of the past timelines, but he had given her enough to know of his tactics, and it seemed every day there were a new set of memories rushing to the forefront. She also knew especially intimately the spiral of self destruction. Though she supposed she'd never met anyone who succeeded in the destruction part so thoroughly and repeatedly and literally as Loki.

She'd lost her spot in bed, but that was all right. It wasn't as if she didn't end up sleeping (or passed out) somewhere else half of the time anyway.

The second night she had a nightmare of frantically and futilely attempting to stem wild gouts of blood from Loki's chest, and when she'd looked around in desperation for help she found she was kneeling in a lake of blood that stretched as far as the eye could see. She'd come awake and immediately grabbed the nearest bottle to drink with trembling hands, the image from her dream combining with the memories of her sisters falling around her. 

After the drink had taken the edge off, she'd marched into her bedroom and roughly shaken Loki awake, then removed his gag.

"Your knives," she said. "I'm going to unchain one of your hands so you can access your magic and you will summon them one at a time and give them to me. All eighteen. And your helmet."

He looked mutinous. "You can't possibly know the correct amount I have."

"Two pairs of normal daggers and fourteen throwing knives." She tapped the side of her head. "I've seen you fight, on and off Sakaar."

He gave nothing away on his face. "I only have a dozen hidden. I will gladly give you those."

"Then you'll stay on this bed and piss and shit yourself until I get eighteen. Thor will understand. I'm not compromising, my prince."

He seemed startled at the title before his snarl deepened. He did not acquiesce.

She shrugged. "Fine."

As she grabbed the sodden ball of cloth to begin gagging him again, he hissed, "Wait!"

She waited, her eyebrows raised.

He swallowed, shut his eyes, and finally caved, the bastard. She was careful not to let her irritation show as she held his wrist tight and plucked each knife from him the moment it was summoned. 

She hadn't really wanted to spend the next two weeks needing to force feed and clean up after him so completely.

Afterwards, she threw the knives and horned helmet into her closet and slammed the door shut, then sat herself on the floor with trembling limbs and drank until she knew nothing at all.

By the fifth evening, Loki had grown noticeably more relaxed. Not entirely, and she knew he was the type to always have some sort of tension running through him, now that she knew best where to look. Yet he'd stopped relentlessly feeling over and checking his bonds for weakness, had all but stopped bruising himself against the chains in fits of futile rage. His mind had begun to settle itself, less smoke coming out of his ears from the cogs turning at full speed. He still fidgeted with his hands, almost constantly, but it seemed out of some soothing effort rather than any tricks. Still, she would keep watch. She wouldn't become complacent.

She'd given him leave to stretch his legs while they had dinner, though a single wrist was still tethered to hers with a length of chain, and she had moved all potential weapons out of reach, including cutlery. The obedience disc gleamed where it rested against his neck. He didn't touch his food, just watched the table through hooded eyes, pressing the thumb of his left hand into his right palm and rubbing in small circles. Occasionally his eyes would dart to the darkened windows, as if to remind himself that no one could see him.

He'd eaten regularly enough the last few days that she didn't feel like forcing an argument tonight. One day without food wouldn't harm him, as whatever his state when he died each time, the body he'd originally ended up with on Sakaar had at least been well fed.

A thought had been circling in the back of her mind. She'd avoided it for days, not wanting to see what his reaction would be. But she supposed he was in as good a mood as he ever would be, now, and she was beginning to lose some of the fear that had made her so short tempered with him the first few nights.

"When you unlocked my memories, did you see them yourself?"

He gave a slow shrug, his posture like that of a deflated balloon. Now that he was starting to let go of some of the stress, the exhaustion was setting in tenfold. She remembered a similar feeling during her early days on Sakaar.

"Some," he said. "But I have enough of my own to worry about. Yours all began to blend together after the first few dozen or so."

"Do you remember the timeline where I died?" she asked.

His eyes focused on her. He raised an eyebrow in a "what do you think?" fashion. "You're assuming there was only one."

"The Grandmaster," she said, and Loki shuddered. "He killed me. Not for vengeance, not because of anything I did. Because of you."

His eyes tightened in a near flinch. He looked away. 

She pressed on, a sick swirling in her gut. "What happened to you after I died?"

His lip curled in what he probably hoped was haughty disdain, but she saw the way his hands pressed harder against each other and his thumb rubbed faster. "The Grandmaster framed me for your death so the Hulk would rip me apart. The beast did so. Ethusiastically."

She could see it. The Grandmaster spinning a tale, the big guy believing his lies, overcome with grief at the loss of a friend.

"I'm sorry," she said, and meant it.

He choked out a laugh. "He does leave an impression."

"It's not his fault, you know. He was played as much as you were."

He met her eyes again in challenge. "And you cannot fault me for not remembering fondly the creature that burst my lungs against my rib cage."

"I never said I did."

"Really?" His tone grew scathing. "You're not going to tell me how I deserved it? You were trying to punish me, that first night you chained me down like chattel. I felt it in the violence of your hands. You enjoyed the bruises and sprains you caused."

It might have been true, but she refused to rise to his bait even as guilt pierced her thoughts. His body was made of stern stuff, after all - it was his mind that had been shattered, and not by her. "Of the two of us here, which one has been attempting to keep you from dying?"

He snarled. "I am trying to die because there is no _point!_ " He leaned over the table towards her, his hands finally separated and crabbed in anger. "Each plan only begets further suffering. The Grandmaster toys with me like a puppet on a string, enjoys my company in some timelines, ignores me in others, and tortures me when it suits him. I've begged for him to end it, crawled at his feet like a dog dozens of times to ask for a true death." Tears had begun to swell in his eyes, but he ignored them as he continued. "Many times he doesn't even remember me, or he pretends he doesn't. Other times he allows me to grovel to his satisfaction before everything is restarted all the same. I've lost and regained my mind time upon time upon time. If my death causes everything to begin again, then if I continuously die at the soonest possible moment, the Grandmaster will be stuck in the same first hour and will be unable to play his game. He will realize, and he will grow bored, at which point I will be allowed to die one final time, permanently."

It was the first time she'd been given a motive for his suicidal tendencies beyond his mad raving.

Inwardly, her stomach rolled, imagining a time loop where she would attempt to stop Hela through several different means, and yet lose her sisters each and every time. To eventually be driven to beg Hela for mercy, and be denied all the same. How long would it be before she lost hope of saving them?

Outwardly, she kept her face hard. "Your plan is shit." He opened his mouth to respond and she jerked on the chain attached to his wrist, pulling him onto the table on his back. His dinner went clattering to the floor. She leapt up and put a knee on his chest, and when he tried to throw her off she grabbed his wrist and slammed it down. "Listen here, princeling, since you don't seem to be fully in on the details of what you woke in my mind. When your brother arrived, and we escaped without you to save Asgard, I was the one tasked by his majesty to raise Surtur in the vault. I used the Tesseract to escape. It drew the attention of the Mad Titan." She leaned closer to him and he showed his teeth. "Thor died before me, his neck crushed."

The tears that he'd been struggling to hold back finally broke free to rush down pale skin. His face crumpled and he clamped his eyes shut, releasing even more.

She spoke again, her voice softer but no less matter of fact. "Give us a chance to at least try to save both you and your brother's life before you completely throw in the towel. You aren't alone in this. I thought you'd learned that."

He let her chain him back into bed without a fuss. His cheeks were still wet but he made no sound, no sobs to accompany the tears.

She reached for the first part of the gag and then paused, her eyes on his blank expression. 

She set it aside without replacing it and then left for the bar.

\-----------

Hulk noticed her melancholy as they sparred the next morning. "Angry girl not angry," he said. "Angry girl sad."

"Oh, angry girl is still a little bit angry," she muttered. Louder, she said, "It's fine. I'm working on it."

Hulk frowned. "Hulk get sad sometimes," he said. "Smash help."

She smiled up at him. "A man after my own heart." She backed up and moved into a readied stance, eager for violence. "Come on then. Smash away."

When they were finished and she had a pleasing ache in her muscles after the hours of training, she sat on the ground and drank deep from one of the bottles the Hulk kept on hand for her. 

Hulk sat next to her on the ground. He seemed pensive, and when he spoke, she realized why. "Angry girl look at Hulk different," he said.

Was she really letting all of this get to her that much? 

She looked up at Hulk and saw a deep-seated fear in his eyes. Guilt clawed at her, even as she cursed herself for ending up with a damn friend on the planet where she meant to drink herself into oblivion. "It's not your fault," she said. "You're a good friend."

The fear eased and the Hulk's features relaxed. "Angry girl good friend," he said.

"I think I'm going to bring someone to meet you soon," she said. "Another friend. You've met him before."

Hulk grunted. "Hulk have no more friends."

"Hulk will have more friends," she promised.

\-----------

Despite her faith in his changing behavior, she sped up her footsteps returning to her apartment, a faint fear that she would find he had somehow screamed throughout the night and drawn the attention of people who would find a way to break in. But the apartment was as it was, and Loki was still in her bed. He didn't appear to have slept much, dark circles stark on his pale face, his eyes staring up at the ceiling.

Well, clearly he hadn't been unaffected by her words. Maybe the bastard would even stop thinking sticking a knife in his own chest was a brilliant idea.

She set food and drink out on the table before moving to release him.

"Time for breakfast," she said as she rounded the bed. His eyes moved to her as she unlocked the chains, but his gaze was eerily blank. Must have gone off into his own head again.

He used the toilet and then she brought him out to the table. He stared listlessly at the food before him.

"You can eat now or tonight," she said. "But I'm not letting you skip both meals today."

He grimaced and finally seemed to become present. "Tonight. I will...food is not an appealing prospect, at the moment."

It wasn't an outright refusal, and he wasn't giving her lip, so she shrugged and drew the plate away to store for later. Her own food she ate eagerly, body hungry after the early morning fights. 

"You were gone all night," he said, voice quiet. 

"Had some drinking to catch up on. And I figured you could use the break to think."

He gave a bitter smile. "Lack of chances for thought is not high on my list of issues."

"You should take up drinking," she said.

He gave her an unamused glare. She shrugged, unapologetic.

After she was finished eating, she asked, "What do you say to a walk today?"

He paled. She saw his throat move as he swallowed with difficulty. She knew his hands were clasped behind the counter, could see the muscles in his arms move as he fidgeted.

"There's something we need to do before your brother arrives," she said. "You're a shapeshifter. You can change so no one will recognize you."

She urged him up from his seat and walked him over to the door. Before she could open it, his hand grasped her forearm in a desperate grip. She turned to him but he wasn't facing her, his head tilted down so his hair covered his eyes. His shoulders were strung tight, and she could feel a tremor run through the hand that held her.

"Hey." She released the door and turned to him fully, pushing the hair back from his face so he could see the seriousness of her expression. His eyes were wide with fear, directed downwards. "Listen. If anyone even gives you an odd look, I'll beat the shit out of them. And if anything happens, I'll kill you myself before I let anyone take you from me."

He finally raised his eyes to meet hers, his gaze searching. 

"You'll get what you want," she soothed. "But do me a favor. When you come back again, if I don't remember, make me."

A small smile pulled the corner of his mouth. "So you can again keep me chained to your bed every night? How tempting."

She smiled back. "Come on."

He shifted into a woman for their journey. Valkyrie tried not to openly stare, a stirring in her gut. It was no wonder the Grandmaster had been so drawn to him if this was yet another of his abilities.

And she wondered if Loki knew how little passersby would pay attention if they thought she was just spending time with another fling. The fact that said fling was on a leash would be a minor detail on Sakaar.

When they neared Hulk's apartment, Loki stopped as she realized what was happening, wrenching back on the chain on her wrist. "You cannot be serious," she said, every inch of her posture screaming of her desire to flee.

"It's best to get it out of the way now," Valkyrie insisted.

It turned out the bared teeth look was still every bit as feral looking on a more feminine face. "You might as well cut out my heart here and now."

"He won't remember he killed you."

"Is that supposed to make me feel better?"

She saw the wild look in Loki's eyes, the terror behind the fury that filled them to the brim. Valkyrie glanced at the corridor leading down to the Hulk's apartment. He wouldn't take well to such a reaction. She sighed. Maybe this was a mistake.

"He's as much a victim as you," she tried. "And you'll need to get along if he helps us."

"He is perfectly happy where he is."

"But you're not. And we're not defeating Hela without him."

Loki said nothing, her breaths harsh in her lungs. Her hands were at her sides, clearly itching for knives, stance poised in ready defense.

Valkyrie moved closer, slowly, in case Loki lashed out and went for the obedience disc controller. She put her hand on Loki's arm, felt whipcord muscles tight and trembling. The breaths became more sob-like at the contact, and Loki's forehead bent until it was pressed into Valkyrie's shoulder.

"He'll tear me apart," Loki whispered.

She remembered her sisters falling around her, pierced by Hela's blades. 

"No," Valkyrie said. "I won't let that happen."

When Valkyrie moved them along the corridor, Loki followed.

The Hulk's room came into view. Loki slowed her steps, but did not stop. When they were in the room fully, Valkyrie kept a supporting hand on her arm.

Hulk was eating in his bed, getting crumbs everywhere. Unlike her apartment, the Hulk's quarters were cleaned regularly when he left for his training sessions, so his room was fairly pristine besides.

Hulk's eyes brightened when he saw her, and he waved the hand that was holding a giant loaf of bread. Then his eyes moved to Loki, and the bread was smashed in his fingers as he clenched his hand around it with a growl.

Loki made a low moan of fear, staring at Hulk like a snared animal. Valkyrie squeezed in reassurance.

"Puny god," Hulk snarled, as he stood on his bed in readiness.

"All right, big guy, listen up," Valkyrie said. "Remember when I said you were going to have more friends?"

"Puny god not friend. Puny god bad." Hulk sniffed the air and narrowed his eyes. "Puny god hate Hulk."

Loki opened her mouth and Valkyrie summarily slammed her palm over her lips. "Not a word," she hissed. To Hulk, she said, "Loki is my friend. And she's in a pretty bad place. Like you were, when you first arrived, remember?"

Hulk sneered, but he lowered his fist. Valkyrie removed her hand from Loki's mouth. Loki was still extremely pale, but she looked less like she would crumble at a moment's notice now that she had not been immediately attacked. Valkyrie kept her hand on her arm.

"How could you tell it was Loki?" Valkyrie asked.

The Hulk sat back on the bed and resumed eating the destroyed remains of his bread. "Puny god smells the same."

Loki made a choked, indignant sound. 

"She could definitely use a bath," Valkyrie joked, trying to steer Loki further from the fear she was under.

The Hulk grunted in agreement. "Use Hulk's hot tub."

Now that the idea was presented, it was actually perfect. The Hulk's bathing facilities were spacious enough that she would be able to keep an eye on Loki without things being cramped and uncomfortable. And the Hulk was in possession of some of the most luxurious and expensive bathing products there were to be found on Sakaar.

Valkyrie clipped the chain around her wrist and began to undo her armor. Loki had frozen again in distress, her eyes locked on to where the Hulk watched them, so she didn't turn back to Valkyrie until she gave her a tap on the shoulder. Her eyes widened comically as she noted Valkyrie's unabashed nudity.

"Are you going to keep those on?" Valkyrie asked, nodding to Loki's clothes.

Loki darted her gaze back to the Hulk, but he just yawned and turned into the middle of his bed. "Hulk nap," he said.

"He doesn't care," Valkyrie said, as if it wasn't obvious. 

"Just the same-"

"Loki," she interrupted. "Remember my promise. I won't let him hurt you, and if it was out of my control I'd kill you before anything happened."

A bark of incredulous laughter. "Except you currently have no weapons."

"I was a Valkyrie. Do you really think I wouldn't know how to kill you with my bare hands?"

Loki still looked troubled. Her eyes darted back to the Hulk, but he was already softly snoring.

Loki sucked in a fortifying breath through her nose, shut her eyes, and magicked away her clothing. 

"Handy that," Valkyrie said, taking in Loki's female form. Her limbs and torso were long and slender, compact muscle filling out her thinness. It was the body of someone capable of running hard and long at a moment's notice if events required it of them.

She'd looked like she wanted to run as soon as she had stepped foot outside of the apartment. But now she stared at Valkyrie, a hint of something else hidden behind the fear.

The stirring in Valkyrie's loins simmered with greater intensity. She reached for Loki's hand. "Come on."

\----------

The entire process wasn't the slow, sexy fantasy Valkyrie had begun to imagine. For one, the intensely high temperature of the bath, while soothing to the Hulk and Valkyrie, flushed Loki's pale skin immediately with heat, and her lips tightened with discomfort the longer they remained. When Valkyrie suggested they exit, though, Loki shook her head and stubbornly grabbed a bottle that lined the tub, popping the cap and taking in the smell. It must have pleased her, because she dumped a generous dollop into her hand and began to scrub her hair.

But there was something definitely wrong, and something that Loki did not want to divulge. 

When her breath grew shallow and her skin turned a brighter red, Valkyrie suddenly grew immensely worried that Loki was attempting suicide through hot tub. But there would be no point in even attempting to wash had that been the case, and this entire thing had been Valkyrie's idea. Instead of insisting they both exit immediately, she moved over to help.

Loki's eyes met hers. They looked brighter, polarized from her flushed face. She seemed to struggle to breathe in the steam that rose from the water.

Valkyrie raised the cup she'd grabbed. "Here. You probably don't want to dunk your face."

Loki tilted her head back and shut her eyes as she allowed Valkyrie to finish her hair. Thus cleansed, she was unresisting when Valkyrie pulled her out, though she quickly grew dizzy and sat on the floor while Valkyrie toweled the water from her skin. Her chest rose and fell with alarming speed.

"So sex in the hot tub is clearly out of the question," Valkyrie said.

Loki gave a weak laugh and her eyelids dropped in fatigue. "I am sorry I am not up to task."

"Well, you did just come back from the dead earlier this week." There was something else there, but it seemed like a secret Loki wanted to guard. She could understand that - it didn't do to have your enemies know your weaknesses.

Loki's eyes went to the Hulk, who was snoring away on the bed. Some of the wariness had gone out of her gaze. "I did try, you know. To befriend the beast. But when your corpse was presented to him, he believed without a second thought that I had killed you."

Valkyrie sat cross legged on the floor to catch her eye. "If I had no memory of you, I would have hauled you to the Grandmaster for slavery and death as soon as look at you. If you had no memory of me, you would have tried to kill me to stop me. He's giving you a second chance without even that benefit."

Loki said nothing, but she looked thoughtful.

"Come on," Valkyrie said. "Let's get your hair combed out."

That night, when Valkyrie was chaining Loki up in preparation to head out for a round of drinking, she paused at the feel of lips against her neck. After a moment of stunned stillness, she grabbed a handful of Loki's hair and crushed their mouths together.

Drinking could wait.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A little F/F in this chapter, and some non-graphic references to previous non-con, dubious consent and torture.

Valkyrie kept a hand gripped in black locks, enjoying the moans that filled her mouth as she alternated harsh and soft grips. She felt legs wrap around her, ankles hooking together at the small of her back and pulling her down insistently, until her pelvis was pressed against the body beneath her.

She wanted nothing more than to keep going and ravish Loki until, at least for a few moments, thoughts of the temporal loop were gone from both of their heads. Loki was strong, but was also currently completely sober, and in possession of a mind that was greatly frayed at the edges. They needed to ensure they did not accidentally unravel that thread.

With that knowledge, Valkyrie reluctantly drew her head up and licked her lips. Loki gave a growl in complaint and arched up, rubbing against her insistently.

The heat in Valkyrie's lower belly stirred upwards until she could practically feel it behind her teeth. "I won't untie you for this," she said, nodding to Loki's hands where they were chained against the headboard. "So you need to tell me if I do something you don't want."

Loki scowled, breathless as she continued to seek friction through the barrier of her clothes. "You're concerned about consent? _Now?_ " She clenched her leather-clad legs tighter against Valkyrie's sides in emphasis.

Valkyrie braced herself up on her forearms so their eyes would better meet. "Keeping you tied down so you don't commit suicide when I'm not looking is different than keeping you tied down so I can have my way with you. If you tell me to stop, or if I do something-"

"Stop," Loki hissed, voice quivering. "I am...not discussing this with you."

Valkyrie held firm. "Then we're not having sex."

A nasty glint showed in Loki's eyes. "It was hardly a concern to you before. You took what you wanted without a care for my opinion."

The memory of the leisure vessel came, of a different time. The Grandmaster's latest conquest - _The Lone Wolf_ \- being left on display, in chains, for anyone who wanted a taste. She'd thought to spare him that, among other things. At the time, she hadn't known why she'd cared. "I didn't know you."

"The perfect excuse," Loki sneered.

Anger flared, and Valkyrie's fingers itched to dig into flesh, to inspire agreement through violence. She had new instincts and a new cause with the return of her memories, but her old habits as a slaver were still there. She kept her hands still against the bed with effort. "You're not doing a very good job of convincing me you want this."

Loki slammed her head against the pillow and clamped her eyes shut. "This form," Loki eventually said, "is not the one that...suffered. It will help, provided you do not insist on _continuing_ a thread of conversation to remind me of those instances." She opened her eyes again, swallowing hard. "You are not him. Or any of the others who..." Loki ground her jaw and gave a heavy exhale through her nose, the familiar fear-backed fury beginning to fill her expression. 

As good of an answer as Valkyrie was ever going to receive. If Loki panicked at any point, they would stop, and Valkyrie would finish herself off alone in the other room, and take whatever verbal lashing she was given in response.

"Fair enough," she said, and dipped her head back down as she tugged at the catches in Loki's clothes.

Having sex with Loki as a woman was no less a delight than having sex with Loki as a man. The skin was softer, her muscles less pronounced but still strong like steel cables. And Loki remained as reactive as Valkyrie remembered, her white neck arched and her breaths coming in moaning gasps as Valkyrie pinched and rolled pink nipples and sucked and laved a pale collarbone with her tongue, eager to see the skin flush. She carefully avoided Loki's neck, the layers of memories reminding her of the panic and fear that such a touch would inspire. 

Valkyrie's hand moved between them to brush against Loki's labia, a finger penetrating into the wet folds while her thumb pressed against the bundle of nerves above them. Loki pressed her face into the crook of Valkyrie's neck and breathed puffs of air against her, a whimper vibrating as a second finger was added. A pleased smile stretched Valkyrie's face, her body warming as she sat up and hooked her forearm beneath Loki's hips. She pulled them up a few inches from the bed to give herself better leverage. Loki's thighs trembled against her sides as Valkyrie went to work in earnest with her hand, pushing in a third finger and moving with rhythmic firm pressure. Warm walls moistened around her hand, and eventually Loki grabbed at the chains that bound her and made a loud, strained noise through clenched teeth. She was getting close.

"Here we are, princess," Valkyrie said, pressing the pad of her thumb hard over the clitoris, again and again, keeping her other arm braced against Loki's lower back and hips, holding the longer body still as Loki's breaths escalated and her head thrashed. 

Loki stiffened and quivered with a wail as her orgasm rolled over her, walls tightening around Valkyrie's fingers. She drew them out after Loki relaxed, legs dropping onto the bed as Valkyrie lowered her back down. Her thumb she kept pressed against the blood-engorged nub above Loki's entrance, continuing with much more gentle stimulation.

Loki blinked rapidly and directed her gaze, wide-eyed over reddened cheeks, down her body. "But you haven't-"

"I'll get mine," Valkyrie interrupted. She was patient, and liked to draw out the anticipation. "But first you're going to come three or four more times."

Loki swallowed, and let her head fall back weakly, her breaths already beginning to speed up again as her second orgasm approached. "Oh," was all she said.

By the time they were finished, it was well into the middle of the night, their bodies covered in sweat and pressed into each other. They had settled into a low haze of lust, mouthing and kissing lazily for several minutes.

Eventually, Valkyrie broke off and rose from the bed, then grabbed the chains beneath it. The flash of bitter disappointment in Loki's eyes was quickly hidden behind a blank mask as she turned away.

"Sorry," Valkyrie said, her body craving other things now that she'd had her fill of sex.

Loki kept her eyes averted, her jaw set as chains were wrapped around her. Valkyrie covered her with a blanket, and felt a stab of guilt as she straightened and replaced her armor.

"I'll be back in the morning," she said, then left before they could fight.

\-----------

"No, no! It's the same as I've explained it dozens of times. You will need to let the lightning hit you. It will have to seem that you are about to lose."

"Hulk never loses."

"And as I said, you won't this time. Technically."

Valkyrie took a long swig from a bottle of the Champion's special stash while she watched Loki, still in female form, argue their plan to an obstinate Hulk. Trying to get the Hulk to even slightly listen to the details of the time loop had been an errand in futility. It simply didn't interest the big green guy. So now Loki was trying to only focus on the fight, something the Hulk would be attentive to. Something simple.

"Hulk know about lightning. Why would Hulk let lightning hurt Hulk."

"Because, you d-" Loki stopped and ran a hand over her face before she could finish the insult. She turned to Valkyrie in accusation. "Are you going to help at all or are you just going to sit there and drink yourself into a stupor?"

Valkyrie raised her eyebrows. She took another long drink just to piss Loki off. "It's not me he needs to learn to trust," she said when she'd finished more than half the bottle.

Loki's jaw worked in frustration, but she turned back to Hulk to try again. "We need the lightning to hit you because we need Thor to understand the power he wields. Then you will win the match and you may ask for him to be brought to your rooms, and we can all begin our escape."

"No Banner."

"We _need_ Banner. Just for a little while. You will return to fight against the giant monsters."

"Hulk fight giant monsters here."

"Not as big as the ones on Asgard."

The Hulk paused. He looked at Loki sidelong. "How big?"

Loki exhaled in relief at the headway. "Massive."

So it was twisting the truth a little. The Hulk would go up against Fenris, but Surtur was clearly the massive thing Loki referred to and the fire giant would be firmly off limits.

Valkyrie had carefully watched Loki's interactions with the Hulk, watched as the compulsive lies that wanted to form had skittered and veered back into mostly truths. It was a good choice. The instant Hulk felt betrayed would not go well for Loki.

And the prospect of gaining yet another friend was definitely a positive on Hulk's list.

"Hulk will get Thor."

Loki's shoulders slumped. "Thank you."

\----------

Thor arrived, right on schedule. Valkyrie dragged her soon to be king off to be imprisoned, and used the hefty sum rewarded to fully restock her supply of alcohol because there was no way she would be able to leave for the bar tonight.

As predicted, Loki was in a state when she returned.

He'd turned back into his male form and tore impatiently at his chains as she approached. "You cannot leave me alone again," he said, eyes flashing with anger. "The Grandmaster's memories will soon return more fully, if they haven't already - if he finds me - if he _knows_ -"

She gently but firmly grasped his face to draw his attention. "I promised I would kill you. That still stands."

He trembled beneath her hands. "He can stop you."

"But he doesn't know that I know. We have the advantage."

"Yes," Loki said, and laughed with such a derisive and wild edge that she ground her teeth. "Advantage. Which your drunken habits will more than negate."

She already felt like punching him. _Well, this should be fun._ Loki had been adamant about keeping Thor out of the loop until the Hulk helped him discover his power. When she'd suggested that Thor hearing about the agony his brother was experiencing would be just as great a motivator to his rage, Loki had flat out refused. He'd been so sharp and vehement that she hadn't argued the point. Keeping things similar to the original timeline was the safer bet, anyhow.

That didn't mean dealing with _Loki_ was going to be a cakewalk. 

She unbound him except for the single shackled wrist, which he gazed at before raising his eyebrow at her. "Thor is going to notice the chain and the disc."

She snorted. "Nice try. Just don't project them when you speak with him."

He hissed. "That will require more concentration than I can afford."

"Then talk to him with the chain visible. Do what you do best and be enough of an asshole that he doesn't notice. You can cover the disc with your hair, at least. I don't give a fuck."

Like hell she was letting him go free when they were so close, when he was obviously dancing on the edge at facing the Grandmaster again.

He glared at her before he shut his eyes and a green shimmer appeared over his form. His posture changed and became more relaxed. It was odd, seeing it so one sided, Loki speaking to air and receiving answers that she could not hear. His anger burned bright throughout the conversation, and when he turned away in a huff, the green glimmer faded away.

He paused and lifted a hand to his forehead, a sway in his stance. Valkyrie caught him just as he nearly fell to his knees. He snarled and shoved at her, fighting her hard enough that she released him. Unsurprisingly, he immediately collapsed the rest of the way to the floor.

She folded her arms with a sigh. "Take it you wanted to fall on your face, then."

He winced and lifted himself on shaking arms, struggling to get his legs under him. There was a venom in his voice that she hadn't missed. "Just chain me back up and go drink yourself sick."

She raised her eyebrows. "Twenty minutes ago you were telling me not to leave."

"I've changed my mind." Despite the words, he made no further attempt to rise from the ground.

"You're really going to do this?" she asked. "God, seeing your brother puts you in a shit mood even more than Hulk."

He didn't answer. When she moved in again to help him, he struck whiplike with a grasping hand. She caught his wrist as he pulled a knife from her belt and kicked him in the gut with enough force that he went flying into the wall. Her hand depressed the button on the obedience disc controller before he even hit the ground, but the knife already rested on the floor halfway between them. She quickly picked it up then moved to stand over him, powering off the controller, but kept her finger poised over the button in case he again attacked.

She didn't need to - the fight had already left him. His chest heaved as he stared up at the ceiling, hands lax at his sides, the usual tremor running through them. She became aware of her own heart pounding in her ears, and a rage growing alongside it. 

She reached down and jerked the chain attached to his wrist so he flipped onto his stomach, then she dug a knee sharply into his shoulder blades and refused to feel guilty about the vindictive pleasure she felt as he grunted in pain. She forced his hands together and bound them behind his back, wrapping the chain tightly from his wrists to elbows.

She pulled him to his feet and half-dragged him on his unsteady legs into the kitchen, pushing him roughly down into a chair. She grabbed more chain to bind his ankles, ensuring he stayed put. When she was done he wasn't looking at her any longer, his hair a wild mess about his face and his eyes set hard in the middle distance.

She grabbed herself a beer and drank a generous portion before she sat down beside him. "We need to have a conversation."

His eyes narrowed in fury at a spot on the wall. "Keeping me restrained seems to be your only method of managing that."

"You're angry."

" _Of course I am angry!_ " His voice rang in her ears as finally his gaze locked onto her, vicious and acidic. His breaths came through bared teeth. 

She swallowed and kept her voice even. "So say your piece."

Some new emotion flashed in his eyes, but he buried it deep before she could get a good look. "You demand I do not kill myself to escape this...this _unending torment_ , but allow yourself full indulgence in your own vices."

She looked at her large can of beer, then back at him. "And?"

He ground his teeth. "We are facing a madman with unimaginable power. Yet you cannot stop drowning yourself in alcohol for _two seconds._ "

She slammed her can against the table to redirect the violence she felt building within her. "You know as well as I do that I can fight even with the drink. I faced Hela's undead without a problem. I've kicked _your_ ass about a hundred times."

Loki did not back down. "I've _never_ even seen you drink water, you hardly sleep between your ridiculously excessive visits to the bar-"

"You're pissed off because I left the other night," she said as the realization flooded her. She'd treated him in sex like she did any of her other flings on Sakaar. She couldn't kick him out like the others, so she had simply left when she was done. She'd even realized that was how she was treating him, on some level, but had rushed out anyway.

He went quiet, a muscle in his jaw working. "No," he said, a subtle slump to his shoulders. "We agreed it would not mean anything."

She frowned in confusion, for a moment wondering if he was now hallucinating entire conversations. Then she remembered, kissing him roughly in a drunken haze, following him into his bed in the timeline when he'd been a slave in the fighting pits. She remembered demanding he know not to get attached. The words had been as much for her as for him - he wouldn't live forever in the arena. She just hadn't expected that she would be the one to die first.

She ran a hand over her head in exasperation. It felt like her brain was throbbing out of her ears. _Fucking timelines._ "That was _years_ ago. I didn't know you."

His eyes were lowered, the energy now fully sapped from him. He slowly rocked forward in the chair. "Of course. You are right - it doesn't matter. When...when he comes for me, a few drinks will hardly tip the balance."

Valkyrie knew he didn't mean that in the sense for their victory. He still believed they would fail. And now he also thought that she was more concerned with drinking than with his life.

She stood from her seat and walked over to him, her hand lighting on his shoulder. A shudder vibrated against her palm.

"Hey." She settled herself into his lap. His eyes glittered with tears but she could see him attempt to rekindle the last of his anger, to draw up his shields. They quickly sputtered and faded, leaving him looking worn and raw.

She pursed her lips, at war with herself. Maybe they would fail. If not with the Grandmaster, then with what would come after. Thanos, and the Snap.

She had not been there, but she was sure that Loki had died on the Statesman in the original timeline. The first death of hundreds.

_Fuck it,_ she thought. _What are you so afraid of?_ She dipped her head and kissed him. When she drew back, he frowned and blinked rapidly in confusion. 

She exhaled heavily. "You're an idiot." She didn't quite know which one of them the words were for. 

When she pressed their lips together again, her hands in his hair, he made a soft sound and then responded with a feverish intensity. She clenched her thighs to keep her seat as he moved, pressed harshly against her like she was a lifeline. His body trembled beneath hers. She felt wetness on her skin and tasted his tears. 

She didn't mention it. 

\----------

She stayed with Loki that evening, even though she very much wanted to go to the fights and see how Thor fared against Hulk. He'd gone away into his mind in a way he hadn't for over a week, curled on her bed and staring at the wall. She'd again reduced him to a single shackled wrist, the other end of the chain connected to her belt. He used the freedom to make his hands grip each other with a bruising intensity.

She sharpened her dragonfang and her daggers, and checked her armor over. She kept an eye on him to make sure he did not mess with the chain connecting them together, a large fearful part of her still very much expecting him to come out and kill himself when her guard was down.

Eventually, she set her weapons aside and climbed onto the bed. She pulled Loki's head into her lap, and shushed him when he made a low noise in his throat. Then she began to card her fingers through his hair, close to his scalp. He relaxed into the sensation, and she was not surprised when more tears dotted the blankets.

She tried to tell herself the frequent tears were good. If he'd gone completely catatonic, they would be in real trouble.

She needed him to try. She didn't want to risk that he would isolate himself if they lost again. She didn't want to spend hundreds of timelines wandering, her memories erased - of having the sense of things that should be that weren't. 

She leaned over and pressed a kiss to his brow. When she began to draw her hands from his hair, he caught her wrist in a harsh grip and dug in his nails. She let him hold her, breathing evenly through the pain, even as a small trickle of blood ran down her skin. It wasn't as if they hadn't done worse to each other during sex.

"I'm here," she said. "I'm not going anywhere."

\-----------

Thor was, as to be expected, very thoroughly surprised when she, upon the Hulk's summons, stepped into his apartment and deactivated the obedience disc on his neck. And his confusion only grew when he realized she was accompanied by Loki, in female form.

"Loki," he greeted in surprise, his eyes looking his currently-sister up and down. "You're alive! Hulk, it's Loki! But she's a woman. Obviously."

Hulk grunted in total disinterest.

Thor picked up the fallen obedience disc from the floor. "Did you arrange this?"

"You might say that," said Valkyrie.

Thor frowned as he caught sight of the obedience disc on Loki's neck and the chain that Valkyrie held in her hand. "What is this? Are you also a captive?"

Loki sighed and rolled her eyes over to Valkyrie, who said nothing. "Oh! I'm sorry, am I allowed to talk this time? Not going to clap your hand over my mouth and speak for me?"

Despite her suspicion that this overly casual behavior was for Thor's benefit, she felt a sting of anger. She grabbed Loki by the arm and shoved her towards Thor, but kept hold of the end of the chain. "Speak with your brother. Explain. Then I'll finish the parts you leave out."

Loki swallowed and took a steadying breath, a crack appearing in her mask. "Right. Thor, you may want to take a seat for this."

Several long minutes later, Thor was sat on Hulk's bed, his initially confused expression growing more and more troubled the more the situation was explained to him. Hulk was messing with some sort of giant puzzle game off to the side.

When Loki was finished, Thor remained silent, his mind working to process the slough of information. Valkyrie wondered just how many times Loki had explained the situation to Thor, and wondered if she chose her words based on those previous experiences. 

Eventually, Thor spoke, "What if we delivered a message to Korg to travel to Asgard separately and you joined us on the leisure vessel?"

Loki sighed, her forehead creased in displeasure at Thor's questioning. "The Statesman would never arrive. Either the Grandmaster stops it or they become lost - I am not sure which. The Commodore would not fit more than a few of Asgard's people. You would refuse to release Surtur and defend Asgard to the death. All of our deaths." Loki clenched her jaw, and Valkyrie saw the effort it took for her to keep her hands loose and at her sides. "You are assuming I have not tried hundreds of permutations."

Thor's fists clenched. "So what happens when I just kill the bastard?"

Loki made a choked noise, the color immediately leeching from her face as her gaze grew distant. A few seconds later, she lost what composure remained, fell to her knees and began to retch.

"Loki!" Thor moved to his sister's side, hands on her arms to steady her.

Valkyrie meant to move forward to help when suddenly she saw it, Loki's words belatedly unfurling the horrific image in her mind, unspooling the details faster and faster. 

Clouds and thunder darkening the sky of Sakaar, shaking the foundations of her apartment. Hearing that the new contender she'd caught, Odin's son, had been somehow freed of his obedience disc and gone on a murderous rampage. He'd attacked the Grandmaster.

He'd lost.

Then - her watching a projection in the sky, of Thor bound upon an outdoor stage. Of Loki muzzled and chained at the Grandmaster's feet, forced to watch as his brother was tortured to death. The same had been done to him immediately after.

Valkyrie hadn't helped them, hadn't truly known, her instinctive desire to send knives to put the poor bastards out of their misery thoroughly squelched by the Grandmaster barring her attendance to the event.

The reason behind Loki's complete refusal to use Thor's love as a driving point for his discovery of his powers became agonizingly clear.

"He kills you both," she said, her voice faint with horror as the memory played out in her mind.

A low whimper sounded from Loki. She clenched her hands into her hair and curled over her knees, rocking back and forth.

Valkyrie felt sick. She felt full of rage.

Thor had moved himself away from Loki as sparks crackled at his fingertips. Then he roared and sent a bolt of lightning flying into the wall.

"No win here," Hulk said. "Grandmaster controls all."

That he did. 

"We need to get the Grandmaster off Sakaar," Valkyrie said.

Thor and the Hulk stared at her.

"We've never tried that," she said. "What happens if he comes up against us _and_ a Goddess of Death and a Fire Giant?"

Loki was still crouched, but her hands slowly lowered as she stared into the air in front of her. Her face was streaked shiny with shed tears.

"I'll be with you," Valkyrie said. Her hand gave a tug on the chain that connected them. "I told you I wasn't going anywhere."

"Nor will I," Thor said, his hand clasped over Loki's shoulder. "Since evidently I've already given you a talking to."

"Loki promised giant monsters," Hulk reminded.

Loki gave a startled laugh. More tears dripped down her face. "I suppose I did."

"So let's put our heads together," Valkyrie said. "Team Revengers, right? We need to find a way to draw him onto the Statesman."

They went quiet as they thought, but almost immediately Loki's laughter came again, loud and long. "I know exactly how to do that." She met Valkyrie's eyes, a wild light in them. "It has to be different."

\-----------

Valkyrie tried to ignore the anxiety swirling in her gut as she released the chain wrapped around Loki's wrist. She removed the obedience disc from her neck next, and Loki caught her wrist in a tight grip as she pulled away.

Valkyrie tensed instinctively, but Loki just pressed a kiss to the inside of her wrist. She felt warmth curl beneath her belly, but she only pulled her hand free in response. 

"I'm not sending you off with some message of devotion," Valkyrie said. 

Loki grinned, the half-mad light in her eyes still strong. "Well, if I die, I can always just find you again. Though perhaps next time I'll try my luck without your memories."

"I don't suppose we could - just a thought - act like this is the time that's going to work?" Thor asked, his voice pained. 

"Good luck. That's what I've been trying to say for weeks," Valkyrie said.

Loki backed away from her, a smirk on her face. She turned away as she reached Thor and then abruptly turned to the Hulk. Her skin rippled, hair changing to crimson, curves filling out. A stranger's face.

"I'm sorry, big guy," she said. "But the sun's getting real low."


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for cliffhanger! Also, just a heads up that the next chapter has a chance it may be posted Sunday the 28th instead of Saturday.

It had to be different.

A dull numbness filled Loki's every fiber as the automatic doors closed him in the walls of what was supposed to become Thor's room. He stared listlessly through the large windows as the Statesman prepared to enter the largest portal hovered above Sakaar. The ship, well fortified, would not give more than a gentle shake in response as it was pulled towards Asgard.

The Revengers had done it, started the revolution on Sakaar for what felt like the millionth time. Now he was alone, and his masks - for the moment - were no longer needed.

He knew that he would not remain free for long. The Grandmaster would have stowed away somewhere on the ship, ready to take him back, to begin the game again. And for his role as a Revenger, Loki would do his best to convince the man that coming with him to Asgard was an appealing idea. It would work, or it would not work. Loki's attempts to sway the Grandmaster on all manner of things always had an uncertain outcome.

How he ached with weariness. He moved towards the lavish bed, resting upon it on his back - though his warring instincts urged him to other movement, to hide or flee. 

There was no point. His thoughts moved as if encased in mud, too tired at the thought of starting again, too tired to continue on.

He'd hidden a weapon during his escape with Thor, a blade that he was keeping in a pocket dimension. If he so chose, he could use it at any point.

The door hissed opened and close. He tensed in readiness, his eyes glued to the ceiling, a small thread of fear and anxiety breaking through the apathy. Now it would happen. He would be drawn into the Grandmaster's orbit, a comet unable to break free. He would crash and burn and start again.

He was far too numb for tears.

"He's not here yet."

Loki lurched up from the bed and stared in shock at Valkyrie. She looked him up and down before she casually wandered over to the decanter from which Thor would eventually drink. As she touched it, Loki's heart seized and he leapt forward, his hand stilling hers.

"Not this one," he hissed, ripping it from her grasp. This item was important. This item had been everything to him, years and years ago, before he had become trapped in time. He turned away to set it out of her reach. 

"Didn't know you had claimed it," she said, confused and offended.

"It's important to my timeline." He glanced warily to the door, but it remained shut. "What are you doing here?"

"I made a promise," she said. When he turned to her, she was removing a length of chain from her waist. "Give me your hands."

Loki stumbled back a step, the hairs on the back of his neck rising. "This isn't your apartment. Tying me to the bed won't save me when he comes for me."

She stared back at him, her posture as tense as he felt. "It's not him I'm trying to save you from. Loki, drop the knife."

He paused, and glanced down at his hand, where indeed the knife had been summoned. Killing himself was almost second nature at this point when presented with the threat of torment. The lure of a simple death clouded his mind.

He swallowed and gazed back at her. Her hands were balled tight, her breaths careful and even. But her eyes were bright with fear and sorrow, unblinking as she watched his face.

He shut his eyes, and placed the knife back into his pocket dimension. "My apologies," he said, as the blanket of exhaustion fell over him once more.

The tension did not recede from her frame. "Your hands."

Reluctant, but too weary to argue her methods, he offered up his hands. She firmly bound his wrists together, then held the end of the chain. She gazed up at him in frustration for a moment, before she drew him in for a tight hug. A thrill filled him and he tensed, unsure how to feel about the gesture. 

Valkyrie ignored his response. "When we reach Asgard, I'll release you to fight."

He finally won over his body's panicked reaction. He rested his forehead against hers, uncertain, then pressed harder when she did not draw away. He reveled in her steady strength.

If only it could be enough. 

"You mean if we reach Asgard," he murmured.

The door came open. Loki threw himself backwards, brought up short by the chain. The scent of spices stabbed into his nostrils.

The Grandmaster froze in the doorway. "Uh - oh! Sorry, wow."

He was here, the being to which Loki's entire life force was devoted. He could feel his body sing at the Grandmaster's presence now that there were no more avenues of escape, ready to be pleasured or ignored or torn apart at his will. The numbness and exhaustion had fled, his magic crackling at his fingertips, desperate for an outlet. Valkyrie gave him a severe look and jerked at his wrists to draw him forward a stumbling step.

His mind was swamped by imagined screams.

The Grandmaster blinked in surprise as he took in the scene, before an expression of delight came over him. "I was wondering where you'd been hidden away this time," he said to Loki. "Making good friends?"

Loki wanted to lash out. He wanted to hide. He wanted to fall to his knees and beg for mercy.

But he'd done all of those things, and more, and still the game moved on.

The Grandmaster's eyes slid to Valkyrie. "Scrapper 142. Don't...don't tell me you were involved in this whole..." He made a face. "Revolution business."

Valkyrie gave him an easy, bright smile. "No, boss. You know me. I don't help anyone but myself and you."

The Grandmaster beamed, but his face fell a moment later. "Yet I can't help but notice you're planning on leaving Sakaar."

"He's Asgardian," Valkyrie said, jerking her head towards Loki. "Like me. We have a history."

"Re-really! Is that so?" The Grandmaster's eyes darted between them with an interested gleam. "Two of my favorite people, connected? Though not is all hearts and flowers, it would seem."

Valkyrie continued to spin her tale. "His sister killed my lover. He's going to help me get revenge." She pulled Loki forward by the arm to better display him to the Grandmaster. "Whether he wants to or not."

The Grandmaster gave a solemn nod. "Uh-huh... and uh, what are your feelings on this, Lokester?"

Loki's heart beat a frantic tempo in his chest. The Grandmaster's memories had at least partially returned to him by now. He knew Loki's name, knew who he was. He would remember what it was to see Loki beg.

_Please end me. Please let there be an end._

Valkyrie added pressure to his chains in a silent signal. He came back to himself with a sucked in breath, tried to steady his raw and screaming nerves. She wanted him to cling to life. And more than that - if he died, then Thor would die.

He would try. He would perform again.

Loki cleared his throat, but his voice when it came still sounded weak to his ears. "It would seem I am not in much of a position of choice," he said, emphasizing the last word. "Though she's promised to release me once I have fulfilled my end of the bargain. Perhaps, if you were to join us..."

"Join you? Hmm, interesting idea." The Grandmaster looked between them, then moved to the decanter Loki had placed aside. "You know, you two really do make the cutest couple. Knew it from the moment I saw you, five minutes ago that is. I mean, I'd pair Scrapper 142 with a brick wall, but..." As well-manicured hands grasped the decanter, Loki felt a noise of protest sound in his throat before he could stop himself. The Grandmaster paused. "Is there a problem? I just thought we'd have a drink between friends. Or uh, blackmailed partners. Whichever. Say, my Champion isn't anywhere on this ship, right?"

"No," Valkyrie answered. "But we'll be joining him soon."

"Great! That's just... so, so good." He uncapped the bottle and gave himself a generous portion. 

Loki felt nausea bubble up in his gut and his vision narrow as the bottle that Thor would have poured himself a drink from was tainted by the Grandmaster's touch. 

_"If you were here, I might even give you a hug."_

_"I'm here."_

The Grandmaster watched him with keen eyes as he drank from his glass. Loki's legs felt as if they would collapse beneath him. He was wrong. His performance would be doomed to fail. He was weak, and a coward, and he _could not do this._ Not again.

A hand grasped at his clenched fists to jar him out of his panicked thoughts. He met Valkyrie's eyes.

"Stop it," she demanded. "You're not going anywhere."

"I'll say he isn't." The Grandmaster gestured at Valkyrie with his glass. "She's never lost an acquisition, you know, once she sets her sight on them." He drained the rest of his drink and then held his hand out. "But here, let me watch him for you for a few minutes. Give you a chance to drink, eat, take a nap - whatever you need to get ready for this whole revenge thing. So dramatic. Gives me chills. What's your sister like?" He asked Loki. "Does she do sparkles out of her fingers, too?"

"I'd rather keep my eyes on him," Valkyrie said.

The Grandmaster waved a hand. "No, no, I insist. He's a wily one, I'll give you that, but I think I have a bit of an idea of what he's working with." He gave Loki a wink. "Don't worry, I won't let him squirrel away. I won't ah, sample the goods, either, not until you've used him up. We're just going to have a conversation."

The Grandmaster stared at Valkyrie expectantly. Loki dropped his gaze to the floor. She would have to do it. They could not risk the Grandmaster becoming violent this early in the game.

Eventually, Valkyrie handed over the chain. "All yours, boss. I'll be back in a bit."

She left. Loki kept the cry that wanted to escape locked behind his teeth, struggled to keep his breathing steady and even. There was a light tug on the chain that bound him and he obediently moved forward. He shivered in anticipation, in terror, all bunched up in his gut in a nausea-inducing swell of emotion.

He wished for the numbness to return.

The Grandmaster pulled him close, set a hand on the small of Loki's back as he guided him. "Come here, don't be shy. It's been forever. Well, I'm not actually sure how long it's really been. The timelines kind of all seep together after the first dozen or so. Do you get that?"

He did not get that; he remembered each of his deaths with more clarity than he wished. But he would not antagonize the Grandmaster. Not this time, though with each beat of his heart he wished for an end. "I do," Loki said. 

"Let's make ourselves comfortable," the Grandmaster said. When he lowered himself into a chair, decanter again in hand, Loki fluidly knelt before him. The behavior almost felt as routine as breathing. His pride had been torn to shreds so many times he did not know if it would ever recover. He knew it would be far safer for him if it never did.

The Grandmaster took his time and served himself another glass. The combination of the scent of strong alcohol, the Grandmaster's own particular odor and Loki's position at his feet unlocked a swirl of sense memories. Loki fought back a conflicting tangle of arousal, anxiety, and nausea.

The Grandmaster spoke. "So, Assberg."

"Asgard," Loki softly corrected, his eyes directed at the floor.

"Your home. That's where we're headed?"

"If you wish to join us." _If you let me arrive there alive,_ Loki didn't say.

The Grandmaster crossed one leg over the other and gave Loki's shoulder a light and playful shove with his sandaled foot. "You know, you've been - really doing me proud. For a while there I thought we were going to have to sit down for another renegotiation, but this is great. I'm looking forward to see what you have in store for me."

As if all of Loki's habits in the past timelines were specifically geared towards keeping the Grandmaster entertained. Did the man even believe Loki when he told him he wished for permanent death? 

The Grandmaster leaned forward with a conspiratorial whisper. "Hey, you know what? I'll give you a hint."

Loki blinked and gazed up from the floor with a frown. "A hint?"

"There uh, actually is a way for you to win the game, technically."

Loki lowered his eyes again, ruthlessly ignoring the very faint flutter of hope in his chest. The resignation that weighed him down more than smothered it. "I've already won the game." Loki's voice was dull but even. Bitterness swelled in his throat so thick he felt he would choke. "I am allowed to relive a semblance my time with you in an endless loop."

"Oh, sweetheart, you do have a way with words." A hand on his chin tilted his head back. He went easily with the guiding motion and bared his throat, anything to keep fingers from touching his neck. The Grandmaster watched him swallow with hungry eyes. "So, you would think, what with me being the origination of this loop, that the only way to stop it would be to convince me, or find a way to somehow kill me."

Loki remembered the sheer agony of body and mind that followed both his and Thor's attempts to kill the Grandmaster. 

_Hands on his face, yanking at the straps to the cruel muzzle that crushed his jaw, forcing his head to tilt back. The Grandmaster's magic smothering his own._

_"This show is for your benefit, pretty thing. Really, I mean - the least you could do is open your eyes."_

_Thor's pained groan sending a spear of despair straight to his heart._ No no no no let this nightmare end please no- __

_"If, if this is too boring, we can always stretch things out for a few nights for your dear brother until we find something that interests you enough to watch."_

_Loki's whimper was caught in his throat as he opened his eyes._

Loki's body began to shake with vicious ferocity, his mind whited out by terror. "No," he tried to say, but his voice was too faint from fear to be clearly audible.

The Grandmaster raised his hand to his ear. "Sorry, what was that? You'll have to speak up."

"No," Loki gasped, his voice gaining volume. "No - I wouldn't - I swear, I-"

The Grandmaster quickly cupped the sides of Loki's face, the links of the chain cold against his cheek. "Honey, sweetie - take a breath. Don't you worry, I'm not saying that's what needs to be done. I wouldn't do that to you. Someone has to die, but it's - it's _definitely_ not me. Why do you think I worked so hard to discourage you from that route? Even if you did manage, it wouldn't work. Everything would just - poof! - reset again as soon as _you_ died. I uh, I made the spell, but I'm not actually the anchor for it."

Loki's brow pulled together as he took in the Grandmaster's words. "What...?"

The Grandmaster rubbed his thumbs in circles on Loki's skin. "Now, now, anything more than that would be telling. I said a hint. Just something to reward you for the lack of stagnation." His eyes moved to Loki's lips, his throat. "I really can't wait until we get to have a proper reunion. Especially since I'll eventually remember everything, this time. We so...I mean, let's face it, we seldom get to try this sort of dynamic." The Grandmaster leaned in with a conspiratorial smile. "You can show me what you've learned."

Loki swallowed. The Grandmaster finished his second drink and poured a third, bringing this one to Loki's lips. Loki did not protest, his eyes sliding shut as the alcohol coated his tongue and burned his throat. 

The Grandmaster hummed in approval. "Gosh, you know, I'm not gonna lie, I could spend hours watching that view. Your neck veins are just fantastic."

The Grandmaster kept his word, though, and however he stared in longing he did not seem to want to either torment or seduce Loki, at least not overmuch.

Loki supposed he would see just how wrong things would go in this timeline when they landed.

\----------

The door eventually reopened. Valkyrie's voice sounded from behind him. "We're nearly there. You're up, Lackey."

The Grandmaster directed a fond smile her way. "All yours."

Loki closed his eyes in relief as his chains were passed over. They'd made it. He was urged to his feet and felt his legs wobble as he moved from his kneeling position. A moment later the room began to spin and he felt the distinct urge to collapse onto the floor.

"Hey," Valkyrie spun him to face her and searched his eyes. "Are you _drunk_?"

It was the Grandmaster that answered. "Yes, um, sorry, gave him a few drinks - didn't, didn't realize that such a small amount would go quite that long a way. I just wanted to see him relax, but it uh, it can be a bit of a struggle to get the dose right."

It was a clear lie. The Grandmaster would have memories of drugging Loki countless times over with all manner of substances. Valkyrie had to know it, too.

She just shrugged and gripped her hand tighter to steady Loki. "Not your fault some Asgardians can't hold their liquor."

She pulled him forward and out of the room, out of the Grandmaster's sight. His body would not quite respond to his efforts to catch up to her.

"I'm not Asgardian," he slurred, suddenly feeling the need to correct her statement. 

"I know," she said. Before he could think too hard on her statement she pulled them into a side room and began to rummage through a metal chest set against the wall. She came back with a large vial that, when the end was removed, held a large needle on one end.

Loki stumbled back a step as his chest seized. "What-"

She grabbed his arm to hold him still. "It's fine. Take a deep breath." Without waiting for him to comply, she jabbed it into his arm.

He grimaced as pain shot through the limb and she depressed the plunger. "What was that?" he meant to say, but broke off in a gasp as fire raced through his muscles. Alongside the uncomfortable tingling warmth, he suddenly felt much steadier on his feet. The fog that surrounded his mind almost immediately dissipated, which was less welcome. Every emotion seemed amplified tenfold upon their return.

Valkyrie tossed the needle aside and began to unlock his chains. "Sakaar's known for its drugs, but not all of them interact well. I just happen to know that this one is an effective counter-active for alcohol."

Loki was incredulous. "You injected me with a _stimulant_?"

"Better than you drunk," she said. "I said it's fine. They even out, mostly. I brought them for myself. At least now you won't be falling over your own feet." She pulled him close and looked up into his eyes. "He wants you to fail again."

“Maybe not entirely,” Loki said. “He gave me a hint.”

She scrunched her nose. “A hint for what?”

“How to end it,” Loki said, attempting to keep his hopes down, “There’s an anchor for the spell, a living person. If they are killed, we will be freed from the loop.” He hesitated in his words as his mind raced. “He hasn’t lied to me thus far.”

“Well, that certainly puts a crimp in things,” Valkyrie said. “We have to defeat Hela first, and at the very least escape the Grandmaster. Then we’ll find the anchor, whoever they are, and…” She trailed off, but her unspoken words rang clear.

“You know Thor may try to stop us,” Loki said.

Valkyrie shrugged. “Thor does not need to know." Off Loki's surprised look, she continued, "An entire universe stuck in a loop, Loki, for thousands upon thousands of years.”

“Except we are the only ones who would notice.”

“That we know. We can try another avenue if you’re up for it, but if I know the Grandmaster he’s just going to find a way to make the game all the more difficult for you the next time.”

Loki sighed. “Well, it’s not you. And it’s not Thor. Or the Hulk or Banner. Your deaths did nothing to change the loop in the previous timeline.”

“So someone close to the Grandmaster who hasn’t yet died?”

The ship abruptly stopped rumbling. Loki looked towards the door to the room. Valkyrie nodded at him and gave him a small push. “Go on, then. Make your entrance.”

Loki shut his eyes and tried to steady his hands, to urge his pounding heart to slow. He summoned his helmet and summoned his armor. With the added layers he instantly felt more secure. It had been a very long time since he had worn them.

“Not bad,” Valkyrie said. “You definitely look a Prince of Asgard.”

“Thank you," Loki said. “Let’s go introduce the Grandmaster to Ragnarok, shall we?"

\-----------

The Grandmaster seemed content to remain on the ship and let things play out as they would. The other members of the revolution remained unaware of his presence, the Grandmaster only coming forward in a paltry disguise to the ship's open doors as they prepared to fight. As Asgard’s refugees piled into the craft to safety, Heimdall pointedly glanced at the Grandmaster when he drew attention to himself by cheering.

"It's a long story," Loki said. "Just...ignore him. He likes to watch."

Thankfully, Heimdall only gave a curt nod in answer, and a moment later they were engaged by Hela's forces.

Loki fought the hordes of undead Einherjar, his blood singing with violence as he sliced and stabbed and dodged. The drugs Valkyrie had given him seemed to help his edge become more keen. Lightning struck Asgard’s palace, the scent of ozone heavy in the air. As the full might of Thor Odinson fell down upon their enemies, Loki felt a spark of hope.

Thor approached him in the lull, breath ragged and face bloodied. “You could have mentioned she was going to take my eye,” he said.

“Unfortunately, it was a bit vital to the process,” Loki answered.

Thor looked up at the ship, where now only nervous Asgardian refugees looked down upon them. “Is he here?”

Loki nodded. “He’s here. He hasn’t made his move yet.”

"She's coming," Valkyrie said. 

They turned to see that Hela was striding towards them with easy confidence.

Thor swallowed. “Then I suppose we’ll continue to take things as they come.”

Loki nodded, then startled when Thor clapped a hand over his shoulder. The tension that rose in him was eased the moment he saw the expression on Thor’s face. “Thank you, brother," Thor said. "For ensuring Asgard’s survival.”

A flash in his mind, of fire and destruction and bodies littering the ground. Loki grimaced, glad Thor would not know the true reason for the expression. "Do not thank me yet.”

Across the bridge, Hela had stopped her approach and was staring them down with narrowed eyes. "You all reek of death more than my army did," she said. 

Thor gulped. "Loki, shouldn’t you be doing something?”

“As a matter of fact, yes.”

\-----------

The first time Loki had moved to cause Ragnarok, he’d faltered at the sight of the archway that lead to the steps to the treasure vault. The memory of his quarrel with his father, and the latter falling into the Odinsleep as Loki’s world fell to pieces about him, was enough to feel as if it had briefly stopped his heart. Now Loki faltered for an entirely new reason.

The Tesseract called to him.

Before, the hurry for Surtur’s crown had enabled him not to notice until he had nearly passed the relic. But he could feel it now, the wisps of power that caressed him, awaiting use. The Tesseract would not perish in Asgard’s destruction – Thanos would find it, either adrift in space or on the Statesman amongst its passengers.

He pocketed it. He also pocketed the Casket of Ancient Winters for good measure. Then he went for Surtur’s crown, with the intent to hurry it to the Eternal Flame. But when he moved with the crown in hand, he was forced to pull to an abrupt halt, terror in his gut as he saw what lay ahead.

The Grandmaster stood next to the Eternal Flame, blocking his access. “Wait, wait, so you’re just going to have the entire place destroyed? That uh… that doesn’t seem like much fun.”


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey all, decided to post this chapter a day early as opposed to a day late.
> 
> You may notice the chapter number change, the original number was just my estimation of what the story would end up as and that has obviously changed. Fairly certain it should be 12, possibly with an added epilogue too - but, we'll see.
> 
> Next chapter will be up on the usual Saturday (the 3rd).

Loki's eyes slid shut as the voice stoked the screaming in his mind to begin again. Here then they were. This turn of events was not surprising, but neither was it welcome. 

There were two contingency plans for this outcome, three if Loki counted killing himself and restarting the loop. The other two would be put into play by Valkyrie, and then Thor and Hulk - one after the other the longer he took to cause Ragnarok.

If they failed, if any of the others died - if he was again thrown into the trash heaps of Sakaar...he tried not to think too hard on it, nor the fact that the idea of dying and escaping this current stress was so, so tempting.

He opened his eyes, directing them down to the floor where the Grandmaster's shadow stretched towards him. He kept his voice low and non-confrontational. "It’s the only way to defeat my sister. She draws her power from Asgard.”

As expected, the Grandmaster argued. “But I just got here! I haven't even had the chance to say hi to your sis. I could watch that epic battle happening out there for _days._ The palace seems nice, too, could use a bit more bright colors but I've always been a fan of, of gold. I was hoping you could show me around."

"There's no time," Loki said, his voice faint. _Please him,_ his instincts argued. _It's the safest way. Just do what he wants. You're never escaping him anyway._

"Now that's just not true. You and me, sugarplum, we've got all the time in the universe." The Grandmaster took a step towards Loki with his hand outstretched. Loki did not move, hating the part of himself that gave a shiver of anticipation at the Grandmaster's kindness - the silken covering over sharp steel. 

The Grandmaster smiled knowingly. "Hey, why don’t you set that thing down? In fact, maybe store it. Looks like a Fire Giant, yeesh. He’d be great in my arena, once I get it up and going again.”

Footsteps sounded on the stairs. Loki glanced over his shoulder as Valkyrie approached, and at the sight of her he felt a small part of his mind jar back into place. Along with it came a cloud of shame.

"Well?” She asked, casual as could be. She approached Loki with feigned antagonism, just as they'd planned. "What are you waiting for?”

The Grandmaster looked alarmed. “Oh, whoops! Everything’s fine here, Scrapper 142. You should really get going, though. Lo here looks like he’s about to take out everything. I’ll uh, try to talk him out of it.”

“The Grandmaster is requesting I do not cause Ragnarok,” Loki said, his hands clenched about the crown, every muscle ready to attack or defend.

“I agreed with this plan,” Valkyrie said. “He owes me. It’s what we want.”

“What you want? But this is a great place! And no offense but uh, I don’t think Sparkles and yourselves would be enough protection when you go travel the cosmos. Lots of sordid folk out there, you know. Not all of them land on Sakaar.”

Valkyrie stared at the Grandmaster, her eyebrows raised. “You promised me I was allowed to use him.”

The Grandmaster looked sheepish, then sighed. “I know, I know – look, I’m sorry, all right? I just get a bit eager, sometimes. You’re right. I’ll get out of your hair for a few minutes. Do your thing.”

The Grandmaster cleared himself from Loki's path and moved to the side of the Vault. He did not leave completely. Nor did he look away.

Loki frowned at the behavior, and his eyes slid to Valkyrie, then back to the Grandmaster. The man’s eyes were locked on Loki with an unusual intensity.

What was going on here?

It didn't matter, he told himself. The first contingency plan had worked. Now he only needed to finish this. 

Loki moved towards the Eternal Flame, to no visible reaction from the Grandmaster. He raised Surtur’s crown. Nothing, not so much as an added ounce of tension to the man’s expression.

Loki hesitated as the niggling in his mind grew. The Grandmaster was not one to wear masks when it came to his emotions, or at least not well. He did not fear Surtur's summoning itself. He feared something else.

The Grandmaster had only panicked when Valkyrie had entered and approached Loki with aggression.

The Norns must have been laughing.

“Did you really kill her?” he asked, still holding the crown poised, the light of the Eternal Flame overtaking his vision.

The Grandmaster sounded taken aback, “What? I'm not quite sure what you're getting at." 

It was too quick a refusal. Loki was furious that _now_ would be when the Grandmaster opted to try his hand at outright deceit. "When you wanted the Hulk to kill me,” he said, rounding on the man, “Because it was fun. Because it was _entertaining._ Did you kill her?” He nodded at Valkyrie.

“He did,” she said, frowning at Loki's delay. "I felt myself dying.”

“Then what is it,” Loki hissed, sudden rage shouldering out the fear, his magic lashing at the ready. Drugs or not, he was grateful for the anger. “What’s the catch to your hint. Someone had to die, you said.”

The Grandmaster was beginning to look annoyed, “I’m afraid I have no idea what you’re on about, sweet pea, but I’m not entirely appreciative of your tone here. Just do your thing and we’ll all head out.”

“You are a poor liar,” Loki growled. He dropped the crown and summoned his knife.

The Grandmaster held up his hands and edged closer to Valkyrie. "Wait! Wait, wait, just - _hold on a gosh darn minute._ "

Valkyrie looked confused. “What’s happening? What are you doing?"

“You are the anchor for the spell,” Loki said. “He would need it to be someone who was already on the Sakaar when I arrived. Someone strong, and unlikely to die. You would have been the greatest warrior present, bar the Hulk.”

She shook her head. “That’s impossible. I died.”

“You remember,” Loki said, chest heaving. “You are the _only_ one who remembers, besides the Grandmaster and myself.”

“Oh, shoot,” the Grandmaster said. He directed sad eyes on Valkyrie. “I was really hoping that I could trust you, Scrapper 142. That you'd come to me if the spell caused any er - side effects." He sighed and raised a hand to his forehead. “Okay, okay, you’re right, it’s her. I should have known better than to think it would take you long to realize after your hint. That is what I love about you, after all, that magnificent mind. I never...never _quite_ seemed to have as much fun in the timelines where it broke completely.”

Loki flinched, but pressed on, determined. “So if Surtur kills her-"

"Why don't you try it and see?" the Grandmaster asked, a little too eagerly.

“Nothing would happen,” Valkyrie deduced. Her eyes were on her sword, her lips tight. She took a steadying breath and raised her gaze to Loki. “The blow can’t be dealt by an outside force from the spell, and since the Grandmaster has already dealt a killing blow once to no change..."

Loki realized what she was saying as soon as she held out the sword for him to take, as the inkling he’d been stubbornly trying to ignore took shape in horrendous reality.

Her hand was unwavering. “You’re the one that has to do it.”

Loki stared at her for a very long moment, his mind screaming protest and yet longing for the possible end. 

The end to everything. 

He vanished his knife and took the sword, his own limb nowhere near as steady. She clutched at his hand with hers, her strong grip stilling him as she kept their gazes locked.

The Grandmaster gave a punched out noise of excitement. “Oh, plot twist! You're not enemies at all, are you? In fact, it looks like you two have become really close." The Grandmaster clapped his hands together in a swell of emotion, and how Loki wished for once the man would _shut up_. “This is just, so terrible, I wish we had more time to work things out. I guess it was fun while it lasted, huh?”

Loki ripped his hand from Valkyrie's and launched the dragonfang at the Grandmaster, skewering him through. The Casket of Ancient Winters was immediately summoned and Loki unleashed the full might of its power, encompassing the Grandmaster in ice. He made sure to continue to fire until the block was solid, stretching over the wall of the Vault. Then he closed the Casket and placed it back into his pocket dimension.

“We are leaving now,” he said, hands shaking as he again reached for Surtur's crown, his gaze skating away from his blue skin.

Valkyrie reached out and he jerked away from her. “Do not touch me! The cold will destroy your flesh."

"You're a Frost Giant," she said, her eyes lighting with realization, and he drew his shoulders up tight and thought - _Now she knows, now she sees the monster underneath._

"Ew," another voice sounded. "And to think that Odin used to constantly complain that I'd brought _Fenris_ into the palace."

Hela. 

She seemed to materialize from the dark corners of the Vault, her crown of horns seeping out into the light first, before her face became visible. 

Contingency plan two, arriving at the worst possible time.

A pair of blades ruptured through the floor at Loki's feet, forcing him to leap back from the Eternal Flame as they formed an X in front of it.

Hela glanced at Valkyrie, and her nose wrinkled. "God, you're fucking it, aren't you? And here I thought the Valkyrie had honor."

"Fresh out of that," Valkyrie said, voice dry, and Loki wondered if she really meant the lack of care regarding his true nature or if the tone was just for show. "What do you want?"

Hela raised her chin. "I want the frost beast to put down that crown, first of all. Second of all, who the hell is he?" She nodded at the Grandmaster where he was still encased in ice. "Nevermind. I don't care. Apparently, we're all stuck in a time loop." She pointed at Loki. "Which would explain why _you_ feel like you should have been dead thousands of times over. You didn't have this air the last time I saw you. I could _feel_ your grubby hands touching my things from the Bifrost."

Loki's frustrated rage was quick to flare back to life. "It's because of you," he said.

Hela sneered. "Me?"

Loki took a shuddering breath. _Stall,_ he thought. _Stall for time._ "If you had just lived up to your _namesake_ and ensured I was dead the first time, I would not have landed on Sakaar and met the madman who decided I was far too much fun to experience a life with just once."

The disgust in Hela's eyes grew. "So you're a Frost Giant _and_ a whore. I hardly see how that's my fault. If you'd like, though, I'd be happy to fix it."

Hela formed a sword from her hand just as Loki dropped Surtur's crown and summoned the Casket again to fire. It did not slow her down. Her weapon easily stabbed through the beam of ice, straight into Loki's belly. Hela's smug expression overtook his sight, her grin all teeth.

He gasped, his magic immediately rushing to protect the wound. Hela gave the blade a little jerk upwards and his concentration fled.

Distantly, he heard Valkyrie give a cry of rage. She leapt onto Hela with a knife, aiming for the neck. Hela managed to dodge enough that the blade went into her shoulder instead, her lips tightening in irritation as she grabbed Valkyrie and threw her to the side, where she crashed into the wall. 

Loki tried to pull free of Hela's sword but met with the sharp ends of more blades at his back, pinning him where he stood. Every breath shifted his body against them, causing them to slice against skin and muscle. He could feel blood pour down his flesh beneath his armor.

"Thanks for that," Hela said, her hand closing around Valkyrie's knife and drawing it out. She placed it in Loki's hand, forcing his fist to close around the hilt. The blades behind him withdrew as she stepped around him, her front pressed to his back. She wrenched his empty hand up between his shoulders. "Do you know what Odin and I used to do to for fun when I was a child, to strengthen our relationship?" He felt her lips at his ear. "We used to hunt your kind for sport."

Old wounds flared with new hurt. Loki squirmed, as much in a panic to avoid any more of her words as for his own physical safety, but Hela's grip was far too formidable, her power grown to great.

Then Valkyrie rose from the ground, weaponless, and an entirely new panic began to form.

"Run!" Loki gasped.

Hela jerked his arm higher in punishment. "I don't think so." Large black spikes rose around Valkyrie to box her in and prevent her escape. Loki felt Hela inspire him forward with the pressure of her own body. He tried to plant his feet, and the blade still in his gut sent sharp agony reverberating through him when he tensed. He groaned and shoved back anyway, his voice rising to a shout as he fought the pain.

"Don't worry, I'll put you out of your misery soon," Hela said, her hold on his hand tightening, bringing the knife forward to direct it at Valkyrie's heart. "But first, let's break this time loop."

Shards of ice exploded outwards from the Grandmaster. Hela suddenly released Loki and he stumbled forward, then stopped the motion with a cry, curled over the sword in his gut. He was desperate to see what was happening, what the Grandmaster was doing, but very aware that with every movement the cruel blade dug in deeper.

Valkyrie was at his side a moment later, her hands steadying him. "What can I do?" she asked, her eyes locked onto the blade with remembered horror.

"It's not fatal," Loki reassured between shallow breaths. "I do not think. Just...just get it out of me."

She immediately wrenched the blade free and Loki collapsed to his knees with a muffled keen, hands pressing against the wound, sending every ounce of magic he had left to keep himself stable. Valkyrie threw the blade aside in disgust.

Loki glanced towards the Grandmaster and quickly looked away as terror stole his breath. Anger - the Grandmaster was angry, a cloud of rage darkening the Vault. Layers of memories of torments poured free through Loki's mind.

But Loki was not his target. Hela was.

Odin's first born was on hands and knees on the ground, her eyes wide with shock as she struggled for breath, for movement. Loki imagined he could see the phantom shadows of tendrils wrapping viciously about her form. As he watched, bruises blossomed over her exposed skin from invisible pressure.

The Grandmaster adjusted his bloodied robes and ran a hand over his hair. "See, this right here? This is why I stay on Sakaar. The universe is - well it's so _full_ of cheaters and spoilsports."

Hela gave a cry and dozens of blades exploded up from the floor beneath the Grandmaster, one after another after another - until he was completely hidden from view. Then she made a choked noise, her head bending under the weight of an unseen force as the Grandmaster's power warred with her own.

Loki's eyes went to Surtur's crown, still resting where he'd dropped it. Valkyrie followed his gaze and immediately ran past Hela, grabbing the crown and throwing it into the flame. She spoke the words to summon Surtur. 

Hela screeched in rage, but all of her efforts were currently aimed at defending against the Grandmaster's hold. A violent rumbling began to shake Asgard.

"Come on," Valkyrie said as she rushed back to Loki. "Get ready." She hooked her hand behind his knees and her other arm behind his shoulders, then lifted him from the ground.

Loki tensed in shock and then cried out again as his injuries flared with new pain. 

"Sorry," Valkyrie said as she ran with him up the stairs to the Vault's exit. "You'd slow us down."

She ran the rest of the way to the Commodore, setting Loki down in a seat in the cockpit. He started the ship and directed it into the sky, glad that his flight skills would not suffer from his weakness. 

Asgard's palace crumbled as they circled, Surtur growing ever larger. Loki maneuvered the ship with the intent to land them on the Statesman.

Valkyrie suddenly spoke up. "Okay, so, I just have to say - whatever you want to try, it’s not going to work. I wouldn’t mind the extra years of living, but my original plan for Sakaar was to drink and to eventually die anyway. There’s no point in drawing this out, especially if you miss your chance and someone else kills me. Or you die yourself and the Grandmaster decides the game needs new parameters to make it harder."

Loki stubbornly ignored her as he double checked that all of his skin had fully reverted after his encounter with the Casket. “I will find a different way to break the spell.”

"How many years have you looked?"

"That was different. I did not have the information that I do now."

"And you're telling me you're fully willing to spend years and years more of trying to figure it out, to chance that you won't just die in the process and end up back at the beginning of everything."

Loki froze, and shut his eyes. He spoke slowly and deliberately. "There are sacrifices I am not willing to make to return things to as they were."

Valkyrie sounded both irritated and unimpressed. "I'm going to guess you haven't put yourself on that list.”

Before Loki could think of a response, one of the doors to the ship tore open and air whipped through the interior. Loki felt the tendrils of the Grandmaster’s magic brush against his own and then ruthlessly tighten. He had the presence of mind to slam his hand down on the ship’s autopilot function to direct it towards Asgard before the pressure grew to suffocating levels. 

“On your knees, dear.”

Loki stood from his seat, only managing the thinnest of wheezes of air. His limbs shook, but he tried to calm his mind, to stretch out the time before his body would fail under the force crushing his lungs. He'd had plenty of practice over the loops in how to endure the Grandmaster's torments.

Valkyrie stood before Loki, her daggers at the ready. The Grandmaster held her dragonfang in his grasp, his shredded golden robes flared behind him in the wind. Surtur’s fire haloed him in a red gleam.

The Grandmaster’s voice was parts annoyance and parts glee. “Okay, so, kind of miffed at this turn of events, but whoo! Did, did not see that coming. Way to get one over on me, Lo."

Loki tried to think through his distress, the tornado of screams that had taken up residence in his mind. The Grandmaster could kill either of them at any moment. The only possible variation would be the length of time he left Loki alive before allowing him to restart the timeline.

The irritation in the Grandmaster’s eyes grew in intensity. “Hey, I thought I told you to do something.”

The invisible tendrils that gripped Loki tightened about his legs and he stumbled into the wall opposite the Grandmaster, refusing to fall. The breaths he could manage became impossible as his ribcage was further constricted, until his bones snapped.

He didn't have the air to howl. He fell to his knees, the impact further jarring his wounds.

The Grandmaster took a step forward. Valkyrie stood firm before him, her hair flying wildly about her face. Ready to defend Loki.

Ready to die for him.

 _No,_ he thought, and slammed his hand down on the pilot's console, activating the opening of the hatch in the floor of the ship. Then he lunged for Valkyrie and pulled her back, sending them both falling through space.

The Grandmaster had rushed forward to watch their descent, but he quickly moved away, likely with the intent to fly the ship after them. Except Loki had sent the vessel on a course to Asgard, and Surtur took that moment to plunge his sword deep into the heart of it. Loki grasped at Valkyrie tighter, and felt chain at his wrist. He met her eyes as she locked them together.

The explosion sent them falling faster into the Void. Loki felt fire at his back and then nothing.


	11. Chapter 11

Valkyrie fell.

The blackness of the Void beneath Asgard leeched into every edge of her vision, and she lost all sense of what was down and what was up. There were no stars here, no light. No sounds beyond what she made - and if it seemed there was air for her to breathe, she wondered when even that would dissipate into the darkness. 

It was a place where lost things were stranded and forgotten, never to be seen again. The antithesis of Sakaar. 

Loki had stopped breathing hours ago. Or maybe it had been merely minutes. Maybe it had been days. Time meant nothing anymore.

His heart had stopped. 

The loop had not restarted.

At first she'd thought he was merely unconscious, but when she'd realized the direness of the situation she had tried to resuscitate him - he'd been badly wounded by both Hela and the Grandmaster, but he was strong. She'd seen what he could endure a thousand times over. This was nothing.

This was _nothing_.

But he hadn't responded to any of her efforts. 

Her vision had whited. She'd pounded on his chest with her fist, as if her violence could inspire him to return to her. Her lungs had burned. She'd longed to run, to find a hole somewhere that she could hide from reality and meet her end. There was nowhere to go. She could only fall.

Something crunched in his breast and gave way. She cried out in a panic and clutched him close as her tears finally ran free. She hated herself more with every sobbed apology she gasped into his hair.

_"I'll only die again eventually,"_ he'd said. 

_Fuck him for being right. Fuck him for getting what he'd wanted._

At least without the Tesseract, Thor and their people on the Statesman would be safe from Thanos. That much she could be grateful for. If the Titan showed his face in the Void searching for it, she would gladly let him kill her. She doubted even Thanos would find a way to pry the Tesseract from Loki's magic, now that it - now that _he_ was dead. 

Her wrist was broken and pained where the chain connected her to Loki, her shoulder in danger of giving way, but she could not bear to unhook herself from him. Maybe eventually, but...not yet. It wasn't as if there would be anyone around to tell her she should do different. It wasn't as if Loki himself would complain about it. 

She squeezed her eyes shut and felt more tears release. They were immediately torn from her face by the fall.

_What are you so afraid of?_ she remembered asking herself before she'd kissed him in her apartment. 

The answer was this. Exactly this. 

\------------

She thought she heard voices. Faces appeared in the black. Hulk. Thor. Korg and Miek. Hela. The Grandmaster. When she closed her eyes to escape them she saw phantom reds paint her vision.

She'd grown too weak to hold Loki any longer, listlessly drifting in half awareness as her chained arm throbbed more and more. Her shoulder had descended into a kind of numbness bordered by agony, only waking into full sharpness when she attempted to move it.

Those were small issues compared to the way her body burned so much that sweat broke out even in the cold of space. All of her muscles cramped, those in her belly tightening so badly they felt as if they would rip her organs out of place. She convulsed and retched on an empty stomach.

Withdrawal. Another demand that Loki had made that would go fulfilled. And the bastard wasn't even alive to see it.

She shook uncontrollably, weak from her body's ferocious punishment. Her sisters came to her, dressed in their battle armor, beautiful and strong. They begged her to come home.

When she reached out to them, they faded away.

She suffered alone.

\----------

When the withdrawal ended, the pain of the chain connecting her to Loki was the only thing that kept her grounded. She'd reset her dislocated shoulder (and his) and pulled him close again, her legs and arms clutched about his limp form, her face buried in his neck. His body was cold, but it seemed it had not yet begun to deteriorate. She imagined herself stuck falling for years upon years, until his flesh and muscle melted away and left only bone. She wouldn't even be able to see what was left.

Or maybe the Void had placed him in stasis, and he would forever stay as she imagined he looked in death. Beautiful and pale, with bloodless lips. The tension finally gone from his expression.

She traced his body with her uninjured hand, his wounds, his clothes, mapping the image of him for her blind eyes. She did it for hours, searching, as if there was some heretofore unmentioned secret item he carried that would help her solve this.

There was only him, and her, and the chain.

\----------

Something pulled at her. She frowned and opened her eyes, or thought she did. The Void looked the same no matter what. She was dizzy from hunger and thirst, the arm bound to Loki now a constant agony. Fresh despair welled as she became hopelessly aware of reality.

She didn't know why these damn emotions bothered even in the blackness of the Void. Absolutely everything had been taken from her. There was nothing left for her to fear.

She felt the pull again. Suddenly her head was a raging fire, and she clamped her eyes shut to scream into the endless silence.

When she opened her eyes, the world was grey. Her feet were on solid ground, and large outcroppings of rock towered up from the landscape surrounded by a dark mist. The air smelled of damp and decay. 

She started and shot her hand to her inexplicably no longer broken wrist. The chain was missing. 

Loki was gone.

She felt panicked by his absence, but when she began to dart her eyes in a search they saw something that gave her pause.

The Grandmaster stood before her, hale and whole, even his clothing freed of the damage it had taken. And next to him, set on a large throne of stone and bones and bordered by her pet wolf, was Hela. _No,_ she thought. _We killed you. We killed you both._

The Grandmaster's shoulders rose in delight. "There she is! My favorite gal, Scrapper 142, the-the stunning, silver _warrioress._ Welcome to the Kingdom of the Dead!" 

She took in the gloom. This was where her sisters in arms had died, when Odin had opened a portal of dark energy to send the Valkyries to stop Hela from escaping. This was where Valkyrie had given up her birth name and fled. She felt the fresh pain of it stoke her anger.

"Am I dead then?" she asked, unsure which answer she hoped for more in that moment. She deserved Hel, she knew that, one brief change of heart did not tip the balance of hundreds of years of enslaving people for money. That did not mean she could not wish for oblivion, some other afterlife where her consciousness fled to no longer torment her with her failures.

"Dead?" The Grandmaster frowned. "No, no! You're just uh, kind of here but kind of not. I could only teleport most of your mind - your body isn't really there, but it'll, it'll feel most of what goes on."

Valkyrie wished for a weapon, wished she could throw herself in reckless rage against Hela _and_ the Grandmaster until she was struck down. She stubbornly ignored the fear that also swelled in her heart. 

The Goddess of Death's mood was more in tune with what was expected of someone who'd been killed in combat. "It's called Helheim," she hissed.

The Grandmaster ignored her, his attention on Valkyrie as he spoke again. "Sorry about the uh, astral tugging. There's only so much you can do to communicate when you've, well! You've 'bitten the dust,' so to speak. Not a fantastic feeling, I have to say, but I've never ever been a part of this particular afterlife before so, so that's neat. Does this make me an official Assbergian?"

Hela stared at the Grandmaster like he was a cockroach that had crawled on her boot. "No. Hurry up and get to the point."

"Hey, we talked about that tone, young woman," the Grandmaster scolded.

Hela made a noise of disgust and turned her gaze away. "Fine."

Valkyrie swallowed. "Where is Loki?"

The Grandmaster grinned with excitement. "That's what I brought you here to tell you! He won the game, option two, fair and square - making me happy enough for the timelines to stagnate. I don't think we're ever going to top the experience I had on Assberg, with my Champion and Sparkles in action and you two love birds facing off against this here beauty - not to mention the Fire Super-Giant and _then_ the entire planet exploding, oh! Just magnificent. It was really a, a once in a lifetime experience. Well, maybe a thousand in a lifetime experience for me, but..." The Grandmaster squinted as he gazed in her direction. "Wait, you said 'where is Loki' didn't you - uh, where _is_ Lo?"

She could feel her face crease in despair as his words sank in. "You stopped the loop," she said. "You let him go."

"Yes, yes I did. I just wanted to deliver some personal thanks, say goodbye before you go on your way to finish out your uh, now singular lives. So? Where's he hiding?" The Grandmaster leaned towards Hela conspiratorially. "Sometimes he's shy."

Valkyrie felt hollow. "He's dead."

The Grandmaster went still with shock. "He's...what? Dead? What do you mean, he's dead?"

Valkyrie sucked in a steadying breath, though all she really wanted was to rage and scream and pull her hair out from the roots. "We fell. He didn't make it."

For a moment, the Grandmaster looked utterly distraught. Then his eyes narrowed and Valkyrie tensed.

On her throne, Hela suddenly grunted in pain and doubled over. Fenris snarled, ears pinned flat against his head, but the whites of his eyes were showing and his trembles sent vibrations through the rocky ground. The air itself seemed to shudder.

The Grandmaster's voice had gone quiet and angry. "Remember that, that talk we had, when I arrived, and you said you didn't know where either of them were, so I had to do all the work of finding them?"

Hela hissed out a breath of a laugh. "Yes. I lied. And afterwards, I immediately reached out and took his life." She laughed louder in contempt. "What are you going to do, try and kill me _again_? This is _my_ domain."

The Grandmaster released her and turned back to Valkyrie, his expression one of exasperation. "She, she's really got quite the attitude problem, this one. We're working on it, though, aren't we, Helen?"

Hela burst blades from her throne that broke off as soon as they contacted the Grandmaster. He sighed. "She's always doing that."

"I will not give him up," Hela said. "If for no other reason than because it displeases you. His spirit was just aching for my call. All your efforts to keep one creature alive, and with every fatality cheated, every bastardization of time, you were only solidifying my ownership. He is death itself, and he is mine."

The Grandmaster's face went cold with fury for a moment, before his features relaxed and he shrugged. "I'm, I'm really sorry about this, Scrapper 142. This isn't how I wanted things to go at all."

"No," Valkyrie said, unwilling to let go. "You have power. You can make her surrender him."

The Grandmaster looked apologetic. "In this uh, in this one instance, Helen overrules me. I may have instigated his resurrection, but afterlife spirits aren't really my thing. She's got all the expertise, being a Lady of Death."

This couldn't be happening. They'd _succeeded_ , and now Loki had been torn from her because the Grandmaster was shit at timing and Hela was a vindictive hag. The loss struck Valkyrie deep. She wished for a bottle, to drink until she was so far gone she passed out in her own sick. 

_No,_ she thought. _He will not be numbered among those I have lost. I will not let her have him._

Hela stared down her nose, waving her hand in a dismissive gesture. "Now get her out of here. Her liveliness is fouling up my realm."

"Wait!" Valkyrie solidified her stance, even as bile surged to the back of her throat. "I'll...I'll make a bargain."

Hela sneered. "A bargain? You? The coward who turned heel from my blades while your sisters in arms were slaughtered?"

"A good strategy. And I'm the only one of us here who is still alive." She swallowed. "Make a deal. For his life. I'll do anything." She had nothing left to lose - nothing that she hadn't already made peace with losing centuries ago.

The Grandmaster's eyes grew round. He plucked at his robes, looking between Hela and Valkyrie with great interest. When the quiet stretched, he said, "Let me add a little something to sweeten it - I won't ah, redecorate your kingdom quite as ostentatiously as I planned while I'm here. We do need to do something about all this grey and black though, Helen, really."

Hela glared. "The dead do not need 'decorations.'"

"Um, dead guy here telling you that we really, really do," the Grandmaster argued.

"Please," Valkyrie said, unwilling to be ignored.

Hela tapped the arm of her throne, considering. "I want your mark."

There was no mistaking what Hela meant. Valkyrie looked down at the inside of her forearm and a moment later one of Hela's blades skidded across the ground to stop at her feet. She could feel the dark magic swirling about the weapon, and she forced herself to hold firm as her body urged her to back away.

"You should have stripped that symbol the moment you decided to flee," Hela said. "But you've kept it, so I want it."

Valkyrie bent and took the blade in hand. The Grandmaster had gone silent, watching her with bated breath.

Hela continued. "I can't kill _you_ from here, you're not tainted enough. I suppose I could make you kill yourself but...I'll settle for letting you leave with your broken beast of a prince. For whatever span of time you try to carve out living in desperation without a kingdom. And eventually, when you die, the mark will call you home to me. The last Valkyrie, bound to my service."

Valkyrie nearly dropped the blade and fled. She should have. Loki had _wanted_ to die. He might hate her if she forced him back to life. He would hate her most of all for consigning herself to...this.

But she couldn't leave him trapped in Hel. The one person in a lifetime of deaths that she actually had the chance to save, and she would not squander it.

She brought the edge of the sword against her forearm and dragged it down in a sharp jerk, flaying the skin around her tattoo in one strip. She hissed as her nerves woke with fire a moment later, as if she had damaged her real body. Darkness leeched from the blade into her flesh as she cut it free. The mark glued to the sword, sealing over it, before the blade ripped itself from her hand and returned to Hela's grip. 

The Grandmaster shivered as he watched, entranced.

"Now where is he?" Valkyrie demanded, ignoring the blood that puddled on the ground at her feet.

Hela smiled, tapping her knee with the flat of the sword. The mark glowed with green light. "Looks like you still have some courage in you after all. Very well. Take him."

One of the outcroppings of rock that reached towards the sky began to sink into the ground, bit by bit, until a large crater was left in the stone beneath it. Loki was within, his skin tinged in grey and his eyes unaware slits. She ran to him and fell to her knees, then grasped at him and hugged him close.

Hela's voice had gone back to irritation. "Now, Elder, you can send them away again."

"Give it a sec, this is a moment," the Grandmaster said distractedly. "I want this as a painting - no! A statue. We can put it right there when they're gone."

"Wait," Valkyrie said, as she realized. "We're still falling."

The Grandmaster looked momentarily confused. "Falling? Oh, falling! That's probably why it took so long to feel you out, lots of space and time shenanigans in the coldness of the universe. Ah, your rescue is near at hand, Scrapper 142. Really, it's been less than half an hour since Assberg exploded. Sparkles has my ship almost to your location. Your uh, physical body's location, that is." The Grandmaster gave an emotional sigh, a hand on his chest. "Tell Lo I'll miss him. Maybe we'll cross paths again one day."

She abruptly felt the fire at her mind and then she was violently jarred back into her physical body, again chained to Loki by a broken wrist and falling through space. 

There was a flash of light.

Her back hit the Statesman a moment later, knocking the wind from her, and then a strong hand grabbed at her shoulder and pulled her up and back. She reeled in confusion at the sensations.

"I've got you!" Thor yelled, and Valkyrie had never been so glad to hear his majesty.

She felt the floor of the ship beneath her back, gravity abruptly taking hold again as she was shut inside it, the warmth of the internal heating at once soothing her cold flesh. She shuddered with relief, then immediately rolled over to check Loki. He was completely still, his eyes open but unfocused, like they had been in Hel. 

"He's not breathing," Thor said in a panic as he unlatched the tether at his waist that had enabled him to draw them in. "Heimdall!"

"Wait," Valkyrie said. "Just give it a minute."

She kept her hand at Loki's neck where his pulse would be the strongest. She waited in complete silence, ignoring the hushed whispers of the audience around her that spoke in horror at their wounds.

Loki's neck gave a faint thump beneath her fingers. Then another. Then another.

Then, he took in a breath. Weak, but his chest began a steady rise and fall.

He was still unconscious, but... "He's alive," she said.

The ship was immediately filled with the sound of cheering. Thor knelt beside her, his head lowered in relief as he gazed at his brother. His hand clapped on her shoulder. "Thank you," he said.

Tears in her eyes, Valkyrie let her head rest against Loki's chest, never wanting to leave the sound of his working heart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey all! I am now on [tumblr.](http://anamelessdragon.tumblr.com) I am new to it so of course currently in the "you haven't liked enough posts/followed enough people/etc" Tumblr pseudo-non existence purgatory, but I am officially active and have been posting into the void (and battling porn bots haha).


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, here we are! Final chapter, and then "chapter 13" is a short epilogue.

He was falling. Again. Blackness filled the world on all sides, his skin cold and his circulation sluggish, every inch of his body pained from his most recent resurrection. It would be mere moments before he landed on Sakaar and the pain grew. He hoped it would become so great that it would immediately draw him back under. He could already feel his mind fray at the edges at the prospect of another restart.

But then voices drew his attention. Distant, muffled, but there. His world grew unbalanced as he realized there was a soft surface at his back, and his upper body was half bare. He was not, in fact, falling.

As he grew more aware he realized that most of his skin felt burnt and stretched, there was a firm pressure wrapped about him from ribs to stomach, and his left arm throbbed with an agony that made him yearn for unconsciousness. He tried to move his fingers and nearly got his wish.

“He wakes.”

"And no screaming, this time. I assume that's a good sign."

"You mean no screaming yet. Loki, stop trying to move your hand, you blasted idiot."

With a jolt, Loki remembered. He opened his eyes to find himself in Thor’s rooms on the Statesman. Heimdall stood near the door, and Valkyrie was sat beside him in the bed, her hand on his thigh, her grip tight and bordering on painful. When he looked for Thor, he found him eyeing the empty decanter on the table. His brother appeared ragged, face drawn and weary, a frown on his face as he fidgeted with his new eye patch.

“So,” Valkyrie said, her voice dripping with irritation, her face likewise tarnished with exhaustion, "that was thrilling. What was your plan? We fall for an eternity?"

Loki ignored her and looked to Heimdall, his mind filled with a sudden urgency. He tried to wet his dry throat. "The Grandmaster-" His voice came out as a near unintelligible croak, and Valkyrie instantly shot up to pour him some water.

"The Elder you brought with you is dead." Heimdall affirmed. "Along with Hela and Surtur."

A glass was brought to Loki's lips, and he swallowed gratefully. When he was done, Valkyrie again took her spot on the bed, no longer touching him but remaining very close.

Loki rested his head back, feeling as if the room was spinning around him. He was free of the Grandmaster, for the moment if not permanently. Thanos would come soon, but Loki swore to himself he would be ready. The gauntleted hand that had once haunted his nightmares had long since been overshadowed by far greater tortures, now a small fear in the grand scheme of things.

A mocking voice began in his mind. _Do you truly believe that? The compounding of tortures does not make you stronger, and it does not make them easier to endure. You've learned that, time and time again. Look at yourself even now. There's no way you will be ready._

Finally, he risked a glance towards the arm that pained him. The limb was nearly unrecognizable, so overtaken with bruising that for a moment Loki feared his Jotun coloring had bled through. The marks were the darkest where the chain, now removed, had bound him to Valkyrie. He looked up at her, but she was keeping her own injured arm out of sight, hidden by her body.

"The ship has rather poor stock in medical supplies," Heimdall said. "Your wrist was all but shattered, and there were several more breaks along the arm. Several of your ribs are also broken, so take care with movement. I reset what I could, but I thought it best to wait and see how you fared with your magic.”

Loki swallowed as the full helplessness of his current state sank in. "How kind of you,” he muttered, wincing as he moved his eyes away from the wreckage of the limb. His other arm seemed mostly unharmed, so he used that to brace himself and push himself up into a sitting position. It shook violently in protest at taking his weight and his broken bones each sent an individual sharp agony that greatly slowed the process. He felt the soft stirrings of panic as his own body fought him over such a simple process.

Valkyrie stared at him with her eyebrows raised in heavy annoyance as he moved, and he eyed her back in wariness in case she decided to push him back down. For the moment, she seemed to content to only make her displeasure clear through her gaze. 

When Loki finally made it up, he bent his head and caught his breath, feeling less trapped now that he was no longer flat on his back. His injured arm throbbed in protest as he struggled to hold it still against his torso.

Thor finally spoke then, and there was an undercurrent of anger that warred with the relief in his voice. "You were lucky we reached you before you were drawn too deep into the Void where Heimdall would not have seen you."

Loki felt the same rage and relief fill him in kind. "Thor, if you're intending to inspire me to live, perhaps boring me to death with a lecture on survival isn't the best idea."

A thin smile stretched Thor's face and just as quickly faded as he moved to Loki's bedside. His remaining eye was marred with a dark circle, and Loki wondered just how long he had been unconscious for Thor to enter such a state. "You might be right, brother. Speaking of survival and things that work very, very much against it, I trust you have the Tesseract?"

Loki froze, guilty. His eyes moved to Valkyrie. She shrugged, her posture lined with tension. "We're not out of this yet, not by a long shot."

Thor folded his arms. "I was informed of a Thanos who would approach to slaughter our people. He would be seeking the Infinity Stone you stole from the Vault. We have also been informed that we do not have much time. So I decided that in the meantime we would make our people less able to be found and murdered."

A tinge of alarm filled Loki. He jerked, but his body riotously informed him that further movement was not possible. His breath quickened. “Thor, where are you taking us?"

Thor's expression softened, and he threw the stopper to the decanter at Loki's chest. Loki gave an instinctive flinch, unable to catch it without compromising his sitting position. It bounced off of him harmlessly. "Rest, brother. The Grandmaster is defeated. I have duties to attend to now, but I promise I will return to speak later. You can keep these rooms as you recover. I understand you favor them. That probably has nothing to do with the fact that they were the exact ones I myself would have chosen." He eyed Loki for a moment longer, and then huffed out a tired laugh. "If you weren't so injured right now, I might even give you a hug."

Thor settled for gently resting his hand over Loki's shoulder and giving him a compassionate squeeze. Loki felt some part of himself that was wound tight unravel at the words, even as he resisted the urge to shy away from fingers resting so close to his neck. It wasn't the same as it had been in the original timeline, but...it was close enough.

Thor left, and Heimdall moved forward. "The King is right. Rest. You will need your strength for what is to come." He nodded, his eyes holding a quiet relief. "Thank you, for helping us."

The room went silent when Heimdall exited. Loki looked to Valkyrie, but she wouldn't meet his eyes. Quiet fears began to rustle together in the back of his mind. This wasn't like her. Which of his transgressions, he wondered, was the cause of her sudden distance. 

He cleared his throat and carefully blanked his face. "I do hope you're not expecting me to apologize for refusing to kill you."

"Stop it." Her eyes turned on him then, angry and bright. "You've no idea what is going through my mind right now."

"Then enlighten me." He could practically see the way his flat and unaffected tone made her hackles rise.

She leaned in closer, her eyes unblinking. "You were not breathing when we entered the Void. And then your heart stopped."

Loki frowned, a chill racing down his back. There was something...he searched his memories for any trace of what she had described. There was only the terror of falling, pain, and the black.

Valkyrie moved to her feet, and Loki finally caught a glance of her arm, swollen and bruised like his, before she turned away. “We need a god-killing weapon, and for that, we need a ship. So, we’re going back to Sakaar.” 

Loki felt his breath stop, his dry throat tightening. She didn't notice as she moved towards the door. The prospect of getting dragged back to that hellscape so soon after feeling the stirrings of hope that he would never see it again made him shudder in misery, but he couldn't bring voice to his thoughts.

Valkyrie paused before exiting. She still wouldn't look at him. "I'm glad you're okay." Then she was gone.

Loki felt the urge to cry out, to call her back. He ruthlessly suppressed it, his jaw clenched as he forced himself to take in air with effort. He was being ridiculous. The Grandmaster was dead. Her oath to him had been fulfilled, the Revengers had succeeded _and_ he'd survived. The most positive outcome. An outcome he hadn't even dared dreamed of for dozens upon dozens of loops.

She had done her part. There was no longer a need for her to stay. 

It was better for it to happen sooner rather than later.

He breathed evenly in the silence that followed, stubbornly ignored his building tears, and keenly felt every beat of his own heart.

\----------

The trip back to Sakaar was not a lengthy one. Soon after they landed, fueled by his anxiety, Loki managed to drag himself out of bed and move like an invalid with the wall for support as he made his way over to the window that spanned far side of the room. Every step had him seize with pain, and several times he had to stop and regain his courage to continue moving, but he eventually made it. In time, it turned out, to catch a glimpse of Thor and Valkyrie along with Korg and Miek as they set out, ostensibly to negotiate with the Sakaarians for a ship. His mind screamed of the danger of this place, even after the revolution. He knew deep down that the danger was only to himself. The Grandmaster had turned the entirety of Sakaar into Loki's personal arena, to fight through in torment and pleasure, to die again and again.

His eyes scanned the horizon, watching the ships fly in the distance over the city as he felt the layers upon layers of experiences on the planet rush through in brief sensations, his mind shying away from one memory only to brush up against another. But he would not move himself back to the bed, needing more a clear view of any possible danger that approached. 

"If you would like some fresh air, I can assist you outside."

Loki tensed in instinctive fright, but relaxed a moment later as he registered Heimdall's voice. He felt his lips pull into a bitter smile, though he was glad of the distraction. "If I never set foot on Sakaar again it will be too soon." He looked down at his left arm, still mangled and useless, and then slowly and carefully turned to the former guardian of the Bifrost. "I note that the Hulk has not joined them."

Heimdall's face held none of the weariness or pain that plagued Loki, Thor and Valkyrie. "No. He had little wish once he was informed that you had destroyed the old barbaric ways of this world."

"Ah." Loki felt his heart begin to pound as he remembered what had happened the last time he'd been at the mercy of the so-called _less barbaric_ citizens on Sakaar after the revolution. He could hear their cheers still, could feel his mind hover on a precipice of remembered terror and grief.

His body immediately broke out into a cold sweat. He was a fool. He needed to get away from the window. What if scrappers saw him? What if they wanted their pound of flesh?

He would kill them all before he let any of them touch him.

"Prince Loki. Do you wish for my assistance?"

Loki came back to himself with his nerves shrieking fire, and found he had at some point slipped to his hands and knees. His magic swirled at his fingertips, weak but unbound. Scorch marks blackened the floor of the ship, radiating outwards from him in a circle.

His neck was free of an obedience disc. No one was coming to take him.

He felt his shoulders slump as he attempted to regain his breath, feeling his wounds ache with fresh pain from his abrupt unconscious redirection of his magic. The place where Hela had stabbed him was especially difficult to ignore. He would have to be more careful, or he would draw out his healing even further. 

Heimdall watched him recover and said nothing, for which Loki was glad. As much as he craved the company with a vicious intensity ( _if you are left unguarded you are helpless_ ) at the same time he almost longed for the ease of being that solitude awarded him. Towards the end of the stretch of loops where Loki had actively tried time and again to play the Grandmaster's game, to find what it was that would lead to the end - _did the Grandmaster want him most as an antagonistic lover or instead one who was doting but equal? Did he want an enemy? A fauning slave? A cowering one?_ \- he found that the loops where he could imagine that no one would know him or see his shame held a certain feeling of security. 

This particular situation was a distant second, but Heimdall would not poke and prod at Loki's weaknesses if he was not asked to do so. Even if they had just been rather blatantly waved in front of his face. 

Loki eventually managed to rearrange himself so he was sitting up with his back to the window, pressed against the bench that bordered it. He immediately and ridiculously felt safer, with the opportunity to wedge himself into hiding so close. 

He only spoke when he was sure he could keep his voice from wobbling overmuch. "So, you saw us fall." 

Heimdall stared at him unwaveringly. "I did." 

"And how long did you watch?" 

"I saw the explosion send you careening into the dark. You skirted the Void's edge, which made it easy for the ship to head you off without entering itself, and for the King to pluck you free before you were dragged in deeper. For us on the ship, it was a matter of minutes before we caught up to you both." 

Loki did not miss the wording. He remembered the first time he fell from the Bifrost, after his defeat at Thor's hands. The hours in the Void stretching into eternity. "What happened to Valkyrie in the Void?" 

Heimdall's face didn't so much as twitch. "That would be something only she can tell." 

And Loki had the distinct feeling she would avoid doing anything of the like. He felt frustration curl within him. "May I remind you that I have not had the best history with secrets kept from me." 

"Then you know what you must do to find your answer." 

Loki scoffed, and rubbed his aching forehead with his uninjured hand. Weariness was beginning to pull at him. "Why are you here?" 

Heimdall took that as invitation and moved across the room. He took a seat on the floor facing Loki, his eyes grave. "There are a number of people who would prefer it if you were not left alone for too long. Myself included." 

"Thor could have just demanded the Tesseract if he was so sure I would use it to wreak havoc." 

"The King does wish for the Infinity Stone to be left in my possession on Sakaar. But it's not your mischief we are concerned about." 

Loki sighed, his brow furrowed as he fought a losing battle against his body's strongly renewed urge for sleep. "There would be...no point for me to take my own life now." 

"Suicide rarely has a true point beyond the minds of those who attempt it." When Loki glared, Heimdall only looked solemn. "I do not say that to mock. We've all endured much. Apparently, more than we know." 

"Yes. You said the Grandmaster was dead." He needed to hear it again. He could not believe it was true. 

"At this point in time, yes." 

"At this point in time," Loki repeated. Of course. If Loki died, and things restarted once more, the Grandmaster would spring back into being. He wanted sorely to fidget with his hands, but his broken arm prevented him. He settled for rubbing the thumb of his uninjured hand against its neighboring finger. 

"You were quick-witted in your plan," Heimdall said. "Such a force of cosmic destruction would be one of the few weapons able to defeat a being of such power." 

_Yes,_ Loki thought with no small sarcasm, _so quick-witted that I remained a toy for his entertainment for untold years before I even managed this reprieve._

The weariness that had been weighing him down suddenly covered him with alarming heaviness, the constant anxiety that bordered his recent surge of adrenaline and magic making quick work of his already low energy reserves. Any response he might have made to Heimdall faded as he began to lose focus. 

He fought back to full awareness with a start as a warmth draped over his shoulders, but relaxed as he realized it was only a blanket. Heimdall had brought bedding to him. Golden eyes met his briefly before a pillow was placed pointedly beneath the bench. 

"I will wake you when they return." 

The anger Loki felt at being treated like a child was no more than a moment's bloom that withered and died as exhaustion filled him. The pain of his injuries was still great, but he could feel his magic working to numb and heal, could feel the inexorable drag towards unconsciousness that it required to work at peak efficiency. The last thing he saw before losing himself to sleep was Heimdall taking up a wordless vigil at the window, his eyes tracking the outside world. 

__

\----------

Loki's rest was fitful. He woke frequently in starts, in pain, unaware of the passage of time, his tired body dragging him back down soon after each time he jerked into consciousness. Eventually, he woke to Heimdall speaking, struggling to clear his mind into waking.

"Prince Loki? Your brother is on his way."

Loki came awake fully then, his body aching and resisting his return to awareness. It hadn't had much time to heal, and the positioning on the hard floor had not been kind to his injuries. He swallowed nervously at the prospect of rising, but attempted so anyway, unwilling to have Thor see him in such a state on the floor. The sight of the window overlooking the trash heaps nearly had him lose his nerve, his instincts abruptly screaming that he needed to stay hidden. 

Heimdall made no comment on his behaving like hunted prey as he took the bedding from the floor without prompting, resetting the blankets with all of the care of a palace servant. He also poured Loki another glass of water to keep within reach. But he offered no physical assistance, and let Loki make his own achingly slow way to the bed, though Loki ground his teeth so hard in an effort to keep silent through the pain that he was sure Heimdall could hear it. After what seemed like an eternity, he managed to pull himself onto his goal. 

When Loki had caught his breath, he made an effort to clothe himself, but found that his body had not healed enough for his magic to spare itself. He tried again anyway, stubbornly straining, until he blessedly felt clothes hug him over his bandages. It was just a simple green tunic, soft and loose, but the added barrier soothed him even as it remained a bit too tight over his swollen arm.

Lastly, he reached out with his magic into his pocket dimension, and the room was immediately filled with a blue light. Heimdall's expression creased in some surprise as Loki held his hand out, both of their gazes on the cube that rested in his palm.

"Take it," Loki offered. "Before I change my mind." 

Thor entered at that moment, his eye focusing on Loki and widening as he saw what was happening. "I didn't expect you to volunteer it yourself."

The weight in Loki's hand was relieved. He felt a sudden ache, bereft as Heimdall dipped his head in thanks before exiting the room.

Loki grasped at the glass on the bedside table as Thor approached, drinking to give himself time to further gather himself for whatever it was his brother wanted.

Eventually he set the glass down and stopped stalling to give Thor a proper once over. Though his appropriately kingly visage still looked in desperate need of rest, Sakaar had left him with no visible new wounds. "Brother. Did your negotiations go well?" 

"Very well," Thor said. "It's already been _months_ since we left. They were...outrageously happy to fulfill our request. We have a ship, and enough supplies to ensure our people will be well fed for a time. We just had to pose for a few hours so they could make sure they copied our likenesses well enough so our faces could be built upon the tower. They wanted to honor us for starting the revolution."

"And the mighty Thor claims another planet of adoring fans," Loki said, the bitterness clashing with his gladness that Thor would not come to the same harm at the Sakaarians' hands that the Grandmaster had sometimes arranged for him. _Don't think on it,_ he berated himself. _Scared as a rabbit. At least try to keep your mind in the here and now._

"Has Valkyrie come to see you?" Thor asked.

Loki stiffened. "No. Why?"

"She left to return to the ship early. I thought maybe..." He broke off at Loki's look, wincing with guilt. "Nevermind. It's none of my business."

"I should say not," Loki said, voice frosty.

"But if you ever need to talk-"

"Thor."

"I am just - I know a thing or two about relationship problems."

Loki gave a scornful laugh at the comparison. "We do not have a relationship."

"That's the same thing Valkyrie said."

Loki felt the stab of that wound deep. He gripped at the covers with his uninjured hand, and tried to keep his face free of emotion.

Thor suddenly grinned. "I lied. She didn't say that." He pointed at Loki with no small measure of smugness. "And _your_ reaction reveals that you don't think that."

" _Thor_ -"

"I'll drop it," Thor promised. The teasing glint in his eye faded and he abruptly looked solemn. "She refused to leave your side for hours after we pulled you from the Void. Heimdall and I could barely get close enough to examine you."

Loki refused to let the words give him hope. Thor was, despite everything, still disgustingly optimistic. "Then I assume I regained consciousness and my - shall we say 'winning personality' - reminded her of exactly why she shouldn't bother."

"I like your personality." Loki directed a dubious look at Thor, who rambled on. "Okay, most of the time I tolerate your personality, as you do mine-"

"Tolerate is too strong a word," Loki broke in.

"-but that doesn't mean I don't care for you. I wish I could have done more to help you. You explained much but you never told me how this truly all started. The Grandmaster began the loop, and you knew exactly how we were to defeat Hela and Surtur with the least amount of casualties. And now that I have further knowledge of this Thanos I have an idea of what happened, but an idea is all it is. Valkyrie could only describe to me the events in the timeline where we defeated Hela and escaped without you."

Loki steeled himself in preparation, though the memory he was about to go over was now a very, very old one. "She was not there when I died in the original timeline. The Titan had me trade the Tesseract for your life. He then killed me." He shuddered and felt the urge to check his neck. "When I woke up, I was falling to Sakaar."

Thor's expression had gone dark. The air suddenly smelled of ozone. "I will not allow this...this _Thanos_ to take a _single life_ among our people in his murderous crusade. Not you, not Heimdall, no one. We are going to Nidavellir."

"Nidavellir?" Loki raised his eyebrows as realization dawned. "You want the Dwarves to make you a new hammer." As far as plans went, it was not Thor's most terrible.

"Yes. We will stay here for a few days, take advantage of the time difference, oversee that our people recoup." Thor paused, and then stared at Loki meaningfully. "I think you and Valkyrie should stay here on Sakaar so you can recover."

Loki felt panic surge. "No."

Thor raised his hands placatingly. "The Tesseract needs to stay here, so you will have Heimdall's eyes to guard you. The time difference would work in our favor to keep it from Thanos. And we currently have enough supplies that you would not need to leave the ship for weeks at least."

Loki would not be calmed, and felt his rage burn brighter at Thor's obtuseness. He'd left out most of the gorier details, but he would have thought he'd explained enough for Thor to realize how many traumatic memories the planet would hold. "Are you mad? Do you truly think I would find any rest, any healing on _Sakaar,_ of all places?"

Thor tried again. "The people here are willing to help-"

"The people here tortured me _for decades_!" Loki's magic writhed and burst free. Glass shattered as objects throughout the room shot from their stations and crashed against the walls. 

Thor growled in admonishment as his exposed flesh was cut by a stray shard. "Loki-"

Loki bared his teeth as his magic frothed in readiness. "Do you need more convincing? Shall I describe the timeline where they marked my body with branding so as to keep a tally of the amount of times they abused me? Where my tormentors were forced to come up with new sadistic ideas for my suffering so as to not damage the burn marks or else get docked points and suffer a loss in their annual contest where they received _prizes_ for the most _creative_ , the most _traumatic_? Well? Is that _enough,_ my king?"

Thor tried again, his expression horrified. "Loki-"

" _No!_ " Loki's magic burst forth again, but was immediately tempered by a pain that soon grew into agony, crushing down his will until he cried out and slumped to the bed.

"Damn it all," Thor cursed, moving forward and lifting Loki's tunic. Loki groaned and could do nothing to stop him, his mind still screaming the protests that his voice could not. Thor sighed unhappily. "There's new blood. I told Heimdall we should have stitched it."

Loki swallowed, sweat forming over his body as his heartbeat pounded. "I will n-not stay." He could not breathe in air fast enough. The room began to spin. "I will kill myself before I let you leave me." He regretted the words as soon as they were free. Now they would try to stop him.

Thor looked startled. "I won't leave you. Brother, do you hear me? You're free, the Grandmaster is gone, and I will take you with me to Nidavellir. Loki!"

The world was going grey at the edges. Thor's face filled his vision and then he felt his brother's arms wrap around him. The pain of the pressure on his injured arm made bright sparks flash behind his eyes.

_"If you were here, I might even give you a hug."_

Here now was the signal he needed. Loki struggled for calm, tears streaming down his face, breath hitching against broken ribs. Everything hurt. He was vaguely aware of Thor's frantic apologies.

"Thor," he warned, voice weak, "I am going to vomit."

"My hugs aren't that bad," Thor jokingly protested as he helped Loki lean over the edge of the bed.

Loki retched, and felt something inside him tear. He had enough time to think _That's not good,_ before he was plunged back into darkness.

\----------

Loki's life became a haze of half awareness. His mind blended the worlds between wakefulness and sleep, horrors lurking around the bed, Sakaarians hidden near the walls in shadow and ready with their catch poles and obedience discs and magnetic cuffs. He ran through the room from end to end, frantic like a caged rodent - each time finding another guard, another potential torturer ready to ensnare him. He strained to summon his knives but his magic sputtered and died each time, his space to move growing tighter and tighter as his enemies closed in.

The first catch pole was clamped about his neck.

He jolted fully awake with a strained cry, then bit off a curse that trailed into a continuous whimper as pain ratcheted through him. He was still on the Statesman, the room dark and empty. His bandages had been changed, his tunic again gone. He made no effort to replace it, aware that his insistence on using even that much magic and stealing it from its current job of keeping him literally together had been in large part to blame for his passing out.

Then Loki saw her, on the ground against the wall. He froze, and went silent with effort.

He couldn't tell if she was asleep in the dark, her knees drawn up and her head bent against them. 

"I'm sorry," she said, her voice muffled. "I should have come sooner."

What was this? Loki only realized he was holding his breath when his lungs began to burn. He began to breathe again, keeping his inhalations stubbornly calm despite his urge to pant. When he spoke, his voice was carefully flat. "You are under no obligation to me. Especially not now that the Grandmaster is dead."

He heard Valkyrie blow out air through her teeth. "Knew you were going to be prickly about it."

Loki felt a tic in his jaw. "Oh? Was I supposed to take snapping at me and then not speaking to me at all for a full day a kindness?" 

"I know. I said I was sorry." She brought her head up and tilted it back against the wall. "But I won't lie and tell you that I wouldn't have kept away for longer. The only reason I'm here now is because your brother was a shortsighted idiot. He should have known better than to rile you up."

 _Yes,_ Loki thought in self-directed disgust. _Because you among all others have the best idea of just how frail my mind has become._ "Well, as you can see, I am still alive. You are free to return to your bottles."

"I'm sober, actually."

Loki went quiet. Confusion rang through him. 

"Yeah, thought that would be what shut you up." She unfolded from the wall, standing in a single fluid movement. She held herself with a stiff air, her posture straight and her shoulders squared, her face illuminated by the moonlight coming through the window. He could see now that she'd changed back into her scrapper armor. "I spent hundreds of years drunk, you know. It was just how I functioned. Every day, every night. It was only the saturation level that changed. I never ran out of money for more alcohol." She sighed, and grimaced "I don't know how to... _talk_ to people, without the drink. Not any of the others, at any rate. Certainly not any of the Asgardians. They all look at me like I'm some sort of hero." She gave a self deprecating snort and began to pace. "You know, all I had to do was _sit in a fucking chair_ so we could get the supplies we needed here, and I couldn't even manage that. I knew Heimdall was watching you, but I kept thinking - I need to be there with him, what if he disappears, what if he..." She broke off, her lips twisting as she went still. She glared down at her arm.

Loki saw it then, the patch where her tattoo had been, the scabbed-over flesh in the midst of the expansive bruising. The symbol of the Valkyries, literally stripped from her body. His breath was stolen at the sight, what it meant. "Who did that," he demanded, struggling into sitting. "I'll kill them."

"You even try to leave that bed and I'll knock you out," she said, voice hard. "It wasn't the Sakaarians. They let me go. Said I wasn't sitting still long enough for their artist. I ran back here." She shrugged. "I sat outside your room, in the hallway."

Loki swallowed. "Why?"

"So you wouldn't run off? So I wouldn't? Because...because even now, I'm expecting that this was all a dream, and I'm still stuck falling, with you dead."

Loki felt the chill from earlier return. "Enough," he ground out. "Tell me what happened. Heimdall said-"

" _Heimdall_ doesn't know shit. Unflappable ass. Always did like to pretend he had all the answers but was too noble to give them out." She swallowed, her expression overwhelmed by sudden worry. "You're going to hate me."

Loki wasn't moved by the nervousness in her tone. It only made his suspicions grow as his mind spiraled in alarm. Had she lied? Had she betrayed him for her own life? Was the Grandmaster even really dead? "I can promise you," he began, "that I'll hate you that much more if you don't just finally _out and fucking tell me_!" 

She said nothing. Her head had dipped down out of the light.

"Is it because I'm not Asgardian?" Loki asked, reduced to stretching for answers in desperation. How fitting would it be that his false skin would again be the cause for his world to collapse around him. "You must have killed thousands of Frost Giants, and now to learn that you've been having _sex_ with one-"

"I don't give a shit that you're a Frost Giant," she spat, her head jerking back up. "I told you I had already figured you weren't Asgardian. Not by blood at any rate. Your actions in the Vault cleared that inkling up. And yes, I've killed Frost Giants. Hunted them. All of the Valkyries and Einherjar did. Don't act like you're cut up about it."

Loki wanted to scream. He wanted to strangle her for continuing to dance around the issue. He wanted to take his knives and-

He stopped his train of thought. He swallowed. Images of her sightless eyes and his dagger in her breast filled his memories.

She suddenly stalked over to the bed with purpose. Loki seized up in wariness, breath quickening as his instincts warned of an attack. 

They needn't have bothered. Valkyrie knelt on one knee beside him, next to his uninjured arm. He cautiously relaxed with a frown. 

"Give me your hand," she said.

He tensed. "Going to chain me up again?"

She made a sound of frustration. "Just give it." She grabbed at his wrist and carefully brought his palm to her forehead. "Do it. Your memory thing." He could feel her shudder under his hand. "I can't tell you. Not with words. But I'm not running, not ever again. And if I have to relive it so you know, then...well, what's one more loop, right?"

Loki's lips tightened. He could do it. It would be a simple working, with her consent. He wouldn't have to rip the thoughts through her like he had before. And if he passed out again after from the expenditure of magic, he knew she would make sure he didn't die from it. 

His anger had all but depleted. Now no longer combated by a competing emotion, his anxiety returned full force. 

Did he even _want_ to see what terrible thing it was that had occurred?

"Are you certain?" he asked.

She nodded against his hand. Her shaking lessened, her position more steady. "Go on."

He pressed the pads of his fingers into her forehead, adjusted his grip so it was more secure. Then he took a deep breath, concentrated, and reached into her mind.


	13. Chapter 13

"No." Thor stared Loki down with his remaining eye and stood as still and impenetrable as a stone wall. "Remember what happened the last time you were here?"

"That was hundreds of years ago," Loki protested. 

"You tried to sabotage and steal their weaponry."

" _Or_ I ensured the solidity of father's negotiations by making them aware of how very vulnerable their defenses were to infiltration, thus fully convincing them that they needed Asgard's protection."

"Yes, and they nearly killed you for your 'help.' You're not leaving the ship."

"I can disguise myself."

"No. You're not _deceiving_ them again, either. They won't respond well to that."

"They will, because they will not know it is me."

"Until your magic fails you again and you are forced to reveal yourself _and_ bleed out on the station floor!"

"I am _fine_. The worst of the damage has been healed."

"So you're telling me that _wasn't_ you who Valkyrie was berating just hours ago about getting blood on the sheets."

Loki and Thor glared at each other through the open door of the ship that the Sakaarians had gifted them for travel. Thor's hand was placed against Loki's chest to keep him inside. Beyond, the cold and dark of Nidavellir awaited. The Hulk was already taking in the realm in awe.

The forges of the station were no longer burning. Loki could feel the remnants of death heavy on the air. He had many reasons for wanting to accompany them, but foremost at the moment was not leaving his brother to walk into such danger alone.

Valkyrie rolled her eyes at them from where she stood just outside the ship. "We need to move, you two. Thanos could be tracking us even now." She said the latter with a pointed look at Loki, and he stiffened indignantly. "Just let him come, your majesty. The Dwarves should know exactly who it is they are helping."

Loki blinked in surprise at her taking his side, the rebuttals he'd been planning now needless. Thor looked similarly startled. Usually, Valkyrie was the first to scold Loki for straining himself.

"And hours ago was my fault," Valkyrie admitted. "I got a bit eager while I was fucking him."

Loki felt his face heat alongside a twinge of arousal. Thor immediately removed his hand from his chest as if he'd been scalded.

Valkyrie shrugged, unashamed. "Had to replace the alcohol with _something_."

"Oh. Oh, no." Thor clamped a hand over his remaining eye. "I thought Loki was just having more of his night terrors."

"I was," Loki said, still blushing furiously but enjoying Thor's discomfort a bit too much to change the subject. "And then I was having some rather fantastic sex."

Thor immediately darted away from the ship and towards the Hulk. "Fine, you can come. Just - _stop talking_."

Loki stepped out of the ship and onto Nidavellir, relieved that he would be allowed to join them. Valkyrie raised her eyebrows as he approached. "There's a time and a place," she admonished.

He frowned at her sudden change of tone. "He was the one that refused to let me out."

Valkyrie folded her arms. "And you ran him in circles arguing. Just tell him the truth next time."

Loki let out a bark of laughter. "Oh, heavens, then he would have been sure to keep me locked up. Do you really think he would willingly let the Dwarves make me any sort of weapon of power?"

She narrowed her eyes, and now a bit of true anger sparked in their depths. "What is it going to take for you to have even half the amount of faith in your brother that he has in you?"

"He can kill Thanos, for a start." In lieu of an apology, Loki reached out and took her forearm in a gentle grip. She went tense as a bowstring even as something in her relaxed at the contact. 

She didn't speak of it, but he could see it when her eyes latched onto him with feverish intensity - she hated any time they were physically apart. Even when they slept - twice now he had been pulled from unconsciousness by her coming awake in a panic and grip him with a bruising strength before she fully realized where she was. 

He leeched his magic into the flesh around where her mark had been, probing for traces of Hela's power. 

"Loki," she hissed, but didn't pull away. "A time and a place."

"Just because the current threat we face is great does not mean I cannot look forward to further dangers," he argued, but released her hand. He saw the way the loss of touch made her swallow.

"Only if it doesn't fuck up our position now," she said. "Remember - we don't have any more resets. If either of us dies..."

Loki stepped forward so their faces were inches apart. "You are _not_ dying," he hissed. "And if you do, I will find a way to gather enough dark magic to break into Helheim and drag you back out myself."

"I believe you," she said, moving a hand up to place it against his chest over his heart. She kept it there for several beats, until something in her eyes finally relaxed. "But only because you're still an idiot." She pressed a kiss to his lips, breaking away before he could even properly respond. Then she turned to follow the path Thor and the Hulk had taken, calling out behind herself. "Anyway, I did it first. It's going to be way less dramatic when it's your turn."

Her back now turned, Loki attempted to reach into his pocket dimension. Nothing came to him. He glanced down at his hands, and grimaced at the violent tremor that ran through them. _Damn._

With an effort, he tried to steady himself, tried to quiet the screaming in his mind. His hands grew more still as he took in breaths, the agitated nerves that had pulled his focus pushed into the background, at least for now.

He closed his eyes and summoned the Tesseract.

The blue glow that pierced his eyelids and the quiet rumble against his palm still held a comfort, despite the circumstances in which he had parted with it in the original timeline. He opened his eyes and stared into it for a long moment, then felt a shiver of anticipation and fear race down his frame. 

Back on the Statesman, the Casket of Ancient Winters would be doing its part, spelled to look like the perfect doppelgänger.

He quickly stowed the Tesseract away again, exhaling deeply, and focused his eyes on Valkyrie's still retreating back.

"We'll see about that."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for reading!! It was a fun jaunt, and I'm happy it was my first dip into fandom, even if I was secretly calling it my "frustrated whump binge" fic in my head, haha.
> 
> I do plan to return to this verse eventually, but at this point I would say probably not for a few months - it's not first in line for priority among fic ideas, and I'm contemplating waiting for Avengers 4 before I move forward with it. That, and when I do write, I tend to suffer from abysmal word counts. I will want to have a good few chapters under my belt before I begin posting. That being said, now that I am on [tumblr,](http://anamelessdragon.tumblr.com) you can check there for notes about any sort of fic progress and possibly fic excerpts, for this verse and upcoming others.
> 
> Thanks again!


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